


Any order you'd like

by ForsythiaRising



Series: The Squad Goes Intergalactic (stand-alone stories) [2]
Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Adora gets to have nice things, C & A flirt constantly, Canon Compliant, Catra gets to have nice things, F/F, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Future Fic, IN SPACE!, Post-Canon, Post-Season/Series 05, entrapdak turns up for like half a second, every single member of the best friends squad has some form of meltdown, everyone both needs and gets a hug, four character studies and a space crisis, friendship & leadership & learning & teamwork, including Darla, lots of beta we live like space lesbians, semi-linear narrative, spaceship-killer She-ra
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-21
Updated: 2020-07-24
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:26:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 26,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25411585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ForsythiaRising/pseuds/ForsythiaRising
Summary: Adora and Glimmer struggle with space, Bow and Catra discuss repairs, and everyone plays musical chairs (minus the music, plus control issues).Or: They’re intergalactic travelers. Standard road trip problems ensue.Or: The captain’s chair, nine ways.
Relationships: Adora & Bow & Catra & Glimmer (She-Ra), Adora & Glimmer (She-Ra), Adora/Catra (She-Ra), Bow & Catra (She-Ra), Bow/Glimmer (She-Ra), Catra & Glimmer (She-Ra)
Series: The Squad Goes Intergalactic (stand-alone stories) [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1767856
Comments: 214
Kudos: 734





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was supposed to be short, quick, and mostly a vehicle for canoodling in the captain’s chair. I got ambitious, for better or worse, and now it’s two chapters long and I want it out of my drafts very badly. What is fanfiction for if not experimentation, I suppose. A massive, endless thank you (and I love you) to my ridiculous and lovely friends, who tag-team beta'd the hell out of this (and also put up with me while I wrote it). An extra-special shout-out to [ChromeEdwardian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChromeEdwardian), who, among other things, served as Entrapdak & co. consultant.
> 
> This one is set significantly prior to Learning Curve, when they’re all a lot messier and still very much at the front edge of this whole space (and road trip, and post-war existence) thing. I suspect I’ll go back to LCish time for some future stories, bc I love them as reasonably well-adjusted space diplomats, but I had a few how-do-they-get-there feelings to work out first. 
> 
> Title from Deep Space Nine because Ben Sisko is the best Trek captain and I'm pretty sure this fic is as close as I can come to a Star Trek AU while remaining religiously canon compliant. Full quote is the following convo:  
>  _Kira: “I suppose you want the office.”_  
>  _Sisko: “I thought I'd say hello first, and then take the office. But we can do this in any order you'd like."_  
> 

* * *

“Autopilot is a go!” Bow calls, hunched over Darla’s navigation panel, “We’re hitting the asteroid field in…”

“What do we do for this again?” Catra saunters onto the bridge.

“...three…”

“Hang on tight,” Adora replies, distracted, “Hey, Glimmer, I need my chair back.”

“...two…”

Glimmer freezes, raises her head from where it’s resting on one palm.

“...one…”

“ _Y_ _our_ chair?” she says, half-kidding, all challenging. 

“...here we go!”

That’s how it starts. 

* * *

_There’s nothing quite like a brand new spaceship._

_It’s striking, state-of-the-art, all deliberate angles and clean lines, with the bridge its finest achievement - brushed silver and blue lights, new-metal scented and fresh and empty, the polished captain’s chair proud at its center. Mara can’t look away from any of it, the flashing lights of the console or the purple glow of its holographics or the way the forward viewport spans the whole front of the ship -_ her _ship. The Eternian official guiding her is probably waiting for a professional, intelligent reaction, but all Mara can manage is a breathless, “It’s beautiful.”_

_“Don’t worry, you’ll have plenty of quality time,” the other woman laughs, “come, we should move on.”_

_Mara lets herself be ushered away, steals a glance back as the woman continues, “We have just one more thing to show you. You’ve been trained in swordsmanship, right?”_

* * *

_“Please enter your: destination.”_

The stupid robot voice is taunting her.

_“Please enter your: destination.”_

Catra narrows her eyes. She taps the screen, presses first the squiggle she’s learned means _off,_ then the one for _end._ Tries some random coordinates.

_“Please enter your: destination.”_

It hadn’t worked the first billion times, either. Catra growls at the user interface, wonders for the billion and _first_ time why she’s _here_ on the stupid bridge instead of helping Adora with lunch. 

_“Please enter your: destination.”_

She doesn’t even _like_ cooking, not even a little, but anything is better than this. Catra tries to grab each side of the navigation panel, tries to shake it. 

_“Please enter your: destination.”_

The surface is too flat; she only manages to score thin claw-lines down the metal of Darla’s starboard console. 

_“Please enter—“_

“Look, you stupid machine!” she shouts over Darla’s automated voice, “I don’t fucking _know_ my—“

 _“—your: destin—“_ the automated voice cuts off when she kicks the base of the console, hard. 

Catra has only a moment to stare ( _did that just work?!)_ before the blessed silence is replaced by an even more annoying sound. “Hey! Stop abusing Darla!” 

She whirls on the resident obnoxious glitterbomb, sitting in the captain’s chair cross-legged and far too comfortable. “Look, _your majesty,”_ Catra says, nerves maybe a bit frayed, “I don’t see you helping with anything, so why don’t you lay off! _”_

Sparkles sits up straighter and huffs. “I’m _helping_!” She insists, and gestures to the bits of broken...something...strewn across her lap.

“Sure, if by _helping_ you mean lazing around with spare bits in your lap.”

“I’m _cataloguing_!” Sparkles shouts, snotty, “And it’s not like _you’re_ getting anywhere with the navigation—”

“I got it to shut up! _”_

“But did you _fix_ it?” 

“I—” Catra checks, and she’s still working on reading the First Ones lettering system, but she’s pretty sure the flashing light on the screen is, in fact, asking for her destination. She presses a button; still flashing. She sneers at it, turns back to Sparkles, and snarls, “maybe!” 

“Uh-huh.” Sparkles’ skepticism is not appreciated.

“Not like you could do any better. Hey, you know what, let’s switch - _you_ can try to do something useful and _I_ can sit around pretending like I—”

“Okay!” Bow’s voice cuts over hers as he emerges onto the bridge, arms stacked high with hardware and wire and metal. “Today’s tally is: autopilot’s out, navigation’s out, thulite levels are _real_ low, shielding’s at thirty percent max, weapons might as well not exist—”

“We have weapons?” Catra asks.

“—antiscanners are making weird beeping noises, hull’s dented as anything, sensors keep flashing random colored lights, engine speed’s at - not thirty, not twenty, but - _ten_ percent, and our turn signal’s broken.” 

“That’s exactly what you said yesterday, Arrow Boy.”

“The thulite thing is new, I think.” Sparkles says, waits for Bow to nod before sticking her tongue out at Catra. Catra growls wordlessly back. 

Bow says, “Newly discovered; not a new problem. Apparently. Fuel crystals have been draining too fast for the last week and I didn’t notice, so - I mean, it could be worse, totally. But uh. Not much.”

Catra sighs, sliding down against the console and to sit on the bridge floor. She tips her head back against the hard metal to stare at the equally hard metal ceiling. “So, what? Asteroid field: one; Best Friends Squad: zero?”

She doesn’t think twice about the words until they’re met with silence. She groans, closes her eyes. _Oh, no._

“Aww! _”_

“Oh, no.” 

“You’re calling us the Best Friends Squad! That’s so—“

“Please, please, do not say it’s—“

“ _—cute_!”

“...cute.”

Catra rolls her head against the wall, fixing Bow with the best narrow-eyed glare she can muster. It does nothing to dampen the glitter in his eyes. “It’s not _cute,_ ” she grinds out between her teeth, and then, “ _you_ do it all the time!”

Bow puts down his whole pile of tech nonsense just to hold both hands over his heart, “Yes, but I’m not you, so it’s not cute when _I_ do it.”

His eyes are almost literally shining. Catra wants to pluck them out with her claws. Except, no, she doesn’t. Maybe a little?

Sparkles interrupts the moral dilemma, chipper and smug, “I think you’re plenty cute, Bow.”

“Thank you, Glimmer,” Bow says, leaning over to peck her on the mouth, and now he’s chipper and smug _too_ , and Catra tries to convince herself she’s leaning towards a yes on the eye-plucking.

She rolls her eyes, turns her glare on Sparkles. “So anyway,” she enunciates, she hopes loftily, “as I was saying before I was so _rudely interrupted—”_

“By ship’s business.”

Catra ignores him, “—I’ve decided that if Sparkles here is so good, _she_ can fix the nav console, and _I_ can lounge around cataloguing uselessly.”

Sparkles winds up to retort, pulling in a breath and opening her mouth before she stops. She lets out the breath, narrows her eyes. “ _Oh_ ,” she says, looking at Catra as though she knows something. Catra looks warily back. _“Oh,”_ Sparkles says again, “ _you’re_ doing this for _Adora.”_

Oh. Catra growls a bit, slumps back against the console. “Oh for— no. No, this is not about your stupid thing with Adora.” 

“Uh-uh!” Sparkles chirps out, gleeful, like she’s learned a secret even though she’s _wrong_ and also _dumb,_ “That’s exactly what you’d say if you _were_ helping her!” 

There’s no arguing with this. 

Bow looks hesitantly between the pair of them - Sparkles practically bouncing with perceived victory in the captain’s chair; Catra groaning from her seat on the floor - and asks, “uh. What’s going on?”

Catra rolls her eyes at him, “You know, the stupid thing with Sparkles and Adora and the chair.”

“Uh...come again?”

“Oh, come on. They’ve got some sort of…” she flaps her hand, picking out a word, “... _game_ where they both try to get the stupid chair.” 

“Wait...really?”

“Yeah, really. They fight over it _every single morning_. I think it, like, doesn’t count before Ship’s Dawn. Or something.” It’s not ‘or something’ and it _is_ Ship’s Dawn - Catra knows because she keeps waking to too much movement way too early or to an obnoxiously empty bed, “You really haven’t noticed?”

Bow looks at her blankly for a second, then replies in a pointed monotone, “Autopilot’s out, navigation’s out, engines are—”

“Okay, yeah, I get it. Well. It’s been a week. It’s annoying. Also: your girl’s a loser.”

“Am not!” Sparkles shouts.

“Are too,” Catra responds, “you’ve managed to win in the morning, what...zero? Times?”

Actually, it was twice, and Sparkles has pulled some surprisingly creative ploys during the nominal Ship’s Daytime hours. But Catra isn’t going to _say_ that. 

Bow turns to Sparkles, asks slowly, “So...you’ve been playing this...game…?”

Sparkles shuffles her shoulders, sitting up straight and folding her hands primly in her lap with a haughty, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” The effect is ruined by the glare she keeps trained on Catra, who snickers.

Bow shoots a baffled look at Catra. “They refuse to admit they’re doing it,” she tells him, then thinks of Adora’s hilariously pathetic, giggling evasions and adds, “Adora’s been insufferable.”

Bow looks questioningly back at Sparkles, who is suddenly excessively engaged with her lapful of metal-and-wires. When she fails to acknowledge him, he turns back to Catra, lost. 

Catra aims for disgusted resignation, but she isn’t even surprised when it comes out fond: “I think they’re having fun.”

Bow eyes his girlfriend, and Catra would bet he’s slotting what he can remember of her habits from the past week into place. “Oh...kay...” he finally concludes, “I guess if it’s fun?” he shrugs.

Sparkles shouts suddenly as the loose wires she’s fiddling with let off a crackle-spark of energy, and all three of them startle. Catra feels her tail fluff and grabs it in an attempt to press it down before Bow notices and decides it’s _cute_. 

Sparkles curses, sucks on her stung fingers and spits out, “Ugh, didn’t the Star Siblings tell us to _avoid_ asteroid fields?”

“Uh, yeah,” Bow says, leaning over the chair to inspect Sparkles’ hand for injuries, “it was on Jewelstar’s list.”

Catra settles back again, “ _You_ can’t be trusted around the hardware,” she says to an affronted Sparkles, then adds, “and Jewelstar is paranoid, that list was _long_. Like,” She mimics Jewelstar’s nervous, chattering tone, “ _asteroids and wormholes and spiders and dreadnoughts and brain slugs and fried foods and black holes and space pirates—”_

“Pirates are no joke, Catra!” Bow interrupts. 

Sparkles leans forward in the chair to stage whisper, “He got himself kidnapped by pirates once.”

“ _I_ didn’t get myself kidnapped by anything! _Sea Hawk—”_

The lights go out. 

Bow stops talking.

_Shit._

Catra blinks in the darkness, takes stock: Ship’s Daylight is out entirely, and most of the console lights have ceased winking, though a few blue ones remain. The engines sound present insofar as they can - a stuttering, choppy hum Catra’s not sure anyone else can even hear - and that’s good, but that’s about it.

Sparkles is the first one to speak. “Darla? Lights up?” And then, when there’s no response, “uh...Bow?”

“Darla, what’s happening?” Bow asks.

_“You are not authorized to access this information.”_

Catra hates that voice. 

Bow lets out a long, long groan that sounds a bit like “what _now?”_ Catra can see, by the dim light of the stars and the superior nature of her own eyes, that his head rolls back on his neck as he does, his eyes close, a furrow appears at his brow. She feels sorry for him, which is not something she’s used to feeling for anyone at all. 

He rallies, though, which she appreciates, and feels his way to the center console, where he practically throws himself down. He’s already slid under when there’s another groan and he shouts - _shouts_ , and damn, okay, guess he can’t hear much down there - for a flashlight, at which point Sparkles dutifully stumbles his way. She crouches down beside the console, and Catra’s about to question why she skipped the flashlight entirely when she sees Sparkles give a casual flick of her hand. The kind she uses on Etheria for little balls of magic purple light. 

_Ah._

Catra chuckles a little, levering herself up from the ground to - _okay, fine_ \- go help, when she freezes in place. 

The fur of her tail stands on end, ears pricking, and she resists the urge to turn her head, opting to watch the center of the bridge out the corner of her eye. A stylus is there, on the ground, where it rolled away from Bow’s little pile earlier, totally normal. 

Except.

_It just moved._

Just a little, a tiny shift. Barely noticeable. 

Right?

Catra checks in with her senses, assesses how much she trusts them right now.

Right.

Sparkles is grumbling, clattering about through the tech pile for a flashlight, and Catra wants to shush her but also if _something’s here_ she doesn’t want it to _know_. 

She take stock anew: their run-in with the asteroid field has, if Bow’s list of repair work is an indicator, left them vulnerable. Darla’s lights are out, abruptly, which has them distracted. She hasn’t heard from Adora for the last few hours, which isn’t normally concerning, except— except something, something she can’t get a look at and can’t get the scent over Bow’s oil-and-metal-repairs smell, is _in here with them_. 

The scent is a loss - she doesn’t know how to get far enough away from Bow without tipping whatever it is off - and she doesn’t want to look directly for the same reason. She moves, very slowly. Tries to look casual as she shifts on soft feet, angling her body and more importantly her _ears_ to the place where the stylus sits, now placid. 

She waits for the _thing_ to give itself away. Considers, briefly, alerting Sparkles and Bow, discards the thought. Lets her breath go shallow. Listens.

Sparkles, muttering.

The clatter of metal bits, an _aha!_ , followed by the barely-perceptible hum of a flashlight turning on.

Catra crouches down, slowly, eyeline on Bow like she’s planning to talk to him but body pointed to the center of the room.

The subtle _beep, beep_ of Darla’s consoles.

Catra rolls her weight to the balls of her feet.

The low hum of their barely-working engines. 

Catra leans forward. 

A soft scrape against the captain’s chair— _there!_

Catra pounces.

There’s the thrill of vindication, the body-on-body slam as she hits something large, tangible, invisible. A shout from her prey and then cold metal as Catra brings it down with her, combined weight a _thud_ against the smooth hardness of the chair. From behind her: a high shout of _“Catra!,”_ a flustered shuffle of fabric and metal. Under her: warmth, solidity. Her claws catch in fabric, the very edge of flesh, a scent that’s— 

—clean, familiar. It finds her brain, then, the brand of warmth and the density of fabric and the squawking laughter and the firmness of Adora, Adora, _Adora_ ’s legs between her knees and skin against hers and hands around Catra’s wrists, holding her off, easily now as Catra registers that the mystery creature stalking them is, in fact, the _stupid fucking love of her life._

Catra shouts, wordless, an uncorking of adrenaline and frustration because _what the fuck._

“Mutiny!” Adora shouts around more snorts, the starlit outline of her materializing with a ripple of cloaking magic, “This is a mutiny!” 

“What—?” Sparkles’ shrill voice comes from behind her, and Catra can imagine her squinting against the darkness, “Adora, what the _fuck_!”

Catra renews her assault, albeit with significantly less brutal intent, “You _idiot!”_

Adora’s still breathless with laughter. “Mutiny!” she shouts again, wrestling Catra by her wrists, “Help, help! I’m being attacked! Here in my _own chair.”_

The last words are directed over Catra’s shoulder, and Sparkles takes the bait, “Is not! You stole it!”

“Don’t know what you’re - _ow,_ Catra! No biting! - talking about!”

Bow’s long-suffering sigh cuts through the chaos, along with an exasperated, “It’s _everyone’s_ chair. This is all real fun, but the lights—”

“Wanna bet?” Adora has one of her self-satisfied smirks on now, because she continues to be insufferable, “Hey, Darla! Lights up!” 

The lights come up, because of course they do, because it’s a fucking _She-Ra_ ship. They reveal Adora in full color, flushed and giggling and golden and somehow looking like her current position was her own casual choice and not a product of Catra _wrestling her invisible form into submission._

Sparkles huffs, “oh that’s _not fair,”_ and Bow lets out an even more exasperated, “really, Adora?,” but Catra ignores them and her fucking ridiculous girlfriend. She’s busy cutting her gaze off to the side of the chair, where Melog has plopped into a smug, languorous heap. Catra is vindictively glad to see they’re too spiky to be entirely blasé, no doubt emotional bleed from Catra’s own frazzled state. 

“Proud of yourself, traitor?” she asks. The answer comes back a lazy affirmative, and Catra glares. She wonders if she can put in a request to someone for a new emotionally bonded cat-shaped space alien creature _and_ a new girlfriend. 

(No, she doesn’t.)

She’s preparing further insults when she feels the brush of soft skin against her jaw, turns back to a smiling Adora bumping her nose there in what could only be considered a nuzzle. 

Catra rears back, narrows her eyes accusingly, pulls her best I-will-grind-you-to-dust-beneath-my-bare-heel-and-revel-in-the-crack-of-your-bones snarl. 

Adora, unphased, whines, “Aw, don’t be like that! I wasn’t trying to freak _you_ out!”

Catra hisses, “Well, you did.”

“C’mon,” Adora pleads, “it was to get one over on _Glimmer,_ not _you.”_ Catra hears a new round of protest go up from behind her, tries not to admit it’s gratifying. “Also, lunch is ready,” Adora’s smile is disarmingly sweet, marred only a little by the giggle-snorts.

But no, Catra’s holding her ground on this one. Even if she settles more firmly into Adora’s lap as she points out, “It’s super dumb and it’s making my life hard and you should be _ashamed_ of this little game—“

“What game?” comes the simultaneous interruption from both Adora and Sparkles, the former not even trying to keep up the pretense of innocence, just the barest second away from another fit of laughter that— yup, there it is, bubbles out of her pretty, cocky little mouth. 

Over the past few months, Catra knows, Adora has had more than her share of seriousness: the beginnings of Etherian reconstruction, leaving the only home they’ve all ever had, meetings and strangers and what aliens the Star Siblings have been able to introduce them to, all wanting to see and hear and take instructions from She-Ra, She-Ra, She-Ra. And now they’re going further still, and Catra knows the asteroid field they’d tangled with marked a line into space truly unknown. She knows that Adora’s tasked herself with guiding them through it, knows that Adora has a whole room of shoddy maps and star charts that she puzzles over late into the night, then crawls into bed beside Catra still tense with a stress that Catra can’t fight, can’t claw away or snarl into submission or even seem to figure out how to share. 

Which is why Catra knows she can’t keep a grudge against an Adora this happy, especially not when that happiness comes with her arms around Catra and that laugh in Catra’s ear. Not anymore, anyway. Not ever again. 

She doesn’t stop glaring, though. Because, no, she won’t keep a grudge, but Adora doesn’t have to know that (and no, she’s not purring, not even a little, okay?). 

And it’s not like she isn’t plotting revenge. She’s reformed, but, hey. Some habits die hard. 

Catra would know. 

—

It’s almost embarrassingly easy to get Adora where Catra wants her, but then, that’s not news. She’s been doing it for years, though this version is much more pleasant than, say, leading her on a bitter (if merry) chase through a fancy ball to kidnap her friends or luring her into an electrocution trap as a ploy to infiltrate her inner circle with a shapeshifting spy.

One day, when it’s funny, Catra’s going to find a stranger and explain her courtship choices, just to watch them stare. If it’s ever funny. Because it’s really not. Funny, that is.

It’s possible Catra isn’t thinking straight. Actually, Catra’s not sure she’s thinking _at all_ , because Adora’s hand is strong at her back and Adora’s hair is brushing her chin and Adora’s mouth is on her throat like _that_ and Adora’s hips are pressing hers into the console which is—

—not where Catra wants her, right. Well, it _is,_ because it _always is_ , but the darkness on the bridge - when Catra forces her eyes open, which is difficult enough because just then Adora does something especially interesting with her tongue, and— no, focus, the _darkness_ on the _bridge_ is getting less and less dark, degree by pre-programmed degree, and Catra has a _plan._

Except Adora presses firmly at the small of her back, hitching her forward, and Catra loses the thread for another long, pleasant moment before, with all the force of will that once singlehandedly commanded an army, she jerks her mind back on track.

It’s only just barely enough. 

But it is, indeed, enough to get her pushing off the console, walking them forward and tugging at Adora’s ponytail, enjoying first a _fantastic_ little affronted noise as Adora’s pulled away and then an equally nice happy one when Catra kisses her _._ Adora barely seems to notice when her legs hit metal, just lets Catra push her to sit on the chair’s edge and lets Catra climb on top of her, lets Catra’s tail curl around her leg and Catra’s fingers tangle at her hairtie and Catra’s smile form against her mouth and Catra _loves_ her, loves the way she’s good and honest and trusting and the way she gasps when Catra’s fangs brush her ear and the way she snickers into Catra’s collarbone when they half-lose their balance and the way she lets Catra distract her when she says she has work to do but mostly the way she gets up at stupid o’clock in the stupid morning to look at star charts on the bridge just to win a stupid competition for a stupid chair because that’s it, that’s Adora at her most utterly lovely and single-minded and merry and trivial and all at once Catra is so caught up in the wonder of her that it’s nearly enough to ditch her plan entirely. 

Nearly. 

But, well. Adora’s not the only competitive one. 

It doesn’t take long - she times it just right - and soon Catra is sliding her fingers down Adora’s neck to snag handfuls of her jacket and then—

—and then, a few things happen very quickly. 

The second one is that Catra presses her knee under Adora’s thigh, urging her to tip sideways until their positions are swapped, Catra seated and Adora standing before her. Third: Adora presses forward, chasing after, propping one knee on the chair and starting a laugh she doesn’t finish. Fourth: Catra slides up against the backrest and brings a bare foot to Adora’s chest, stopping her in her tracks.

And first, before any of it: the room lights the very last notch to Ship’s Dawn. 

And last: Adora realizes she’s been betrayed. 

They hang there in silence, breathing heavily, Adora’s knee balanced between Catra’s thighs and Catra slumped down so her foot can press into Adora’s sternum. Adora has a hand curled around Catra’s ankle, there, and the leashed strength of her grip matches a darkness in her blue, blue eyes. 

It’s a step in a dance they know, and Catra is struck with a vision of the next ones: Catra kicks hard with any leverage the chair can provide, claws on her toes digging into Adora’s skin till it bleeds; Adora’s hand pulls tight around her ankle, crushing, and yanks, wrenches Catra down fast and hard so her head slams into the metal. Disorientation, for a second, before Catra recovers and uses her low position to drag Adora’s legs out from under her, sends her crashing and lets Catra get her claws to Adora’s neck. Maybe she succeeds; maybe Adora gets her hand in Catra’s hair instead, incandescent with anger as she clutches the short strands tight and pulls hard, shoving Catra down and aggravating the bloody skin where Catra’s head hit the chair before. 

Panting, eyes locked in the harsh light of artificial dawn, Catra thinks it could happen. They know the steps; it would be so, so easy to dance them. And maybe things have changed, and maybe Catra knows that, but in this moment between moments, adrenaline shooting through her veins, Catra thinks, irrationally: it makes sense. Catra thinks: it could happen.

It doesn’t. 

Instead, Adora’s grip on Catra’s ankle loosens, fingers delicate as she tugs it off her chest. She guides it up, just a bit, in a way that still forces Catra to sink lower into the chair but without the cracking brutality of flesh-on-metal. Adora holds Catra’s gaze as she ducks her head down, presses a feather-light kiss to the thin skin of Catra’s ankle bone, and her voice is the furthest thing from angry when she says, low, “You cheated.” 

Catra stares back at her, breathless, and thinks senselessly, incredulously, _I win_. The chair, the girl, the life, those eyes watching her with promises they both can maybe even keep, nearly as palpable as Adora’s hand on her skin. She waits for the familiar sting of _I-can’t-deserve-this_ , but for once it doesn’t come. _I win_ , she thinks, and she wants to shout it. She wants to get up and stand on the chair and gloat her victory. She wants to go back in time and find herself at eight and volatile and scared, at eighteen and angry and cruel, grab those girls by the shoulders and shake them and scream it in their ears. She wants to tug her foot back, hook it around Adora and pull her into another kiss and never let her go. She wants to—

It’s by force of will that, instead, she coolly tilts her head. “There were rules?” she asks with faux-innocence. “You should have said.” 

Adora examines her for another moment, and Catra suddenly knows exactly what Adora is thinking. She doesn’t, all the time - for all that Catra knows Adora better than she knows anyone else in the universe, Adora is still so often her greatest mystery. 

Right now, though, Adora is transparent as glass, and Catra thinks that maybe she is too. Right now, _I win,_ Catra’s gaze says; and Adora’s replies, _me too._

“ _—no_ , Bow, I’m _late,_ I can _— really?_ In the _chair?!”_ Sparkles’ voice comes from behind them and the spell is broken, Catra laughing as Adora grumbles, drops her ankle entirely, steps back. 

“She _cheated_ , Glimmer!” Adora shouts, hands going up into the air.

Catra lets her legs cross, sits up a little straighter, affects boredom. “Did not.”

“Thank you, Catra!” Sparkles sing-songs, moving towards the chair, and oh— _oh_ , she thinks Catra is _helping_. 

Catra grins. 

“Nuh-uh.” She says. Makes a show of stretching, settling in. “Mine.”

Sparkles stops, hands on her hips. “What?! You’re not even _playing!”_

“There’s a game?”

“ _Catra!”_ Sparkles hisses.

“I didn’t know there was a game - I’m so confused,” Catra drawls.

Sparkles huffs, gets even sparklier with rage, “Well— well— it doesn’t _matter_ because you _cheated_!”

“How would you know? You weren’t there.”

“It’s _you!_ Of _course_ you cheated!” 

That stings, a little, but not a lot. And it’s not like she’s wrong, generally speaking. 

“So let’s say I humor you,” Catra says, and enjoys when the angry pink of Sparkles’ face goes red, “what rule did I break _exactly_ , huh?”

“I’m sure—”

“ _Are_ there any rules?”

“Of course there—”

“Because, like, I haven’t heard any rules. Of this game. That doesn’t exist.”

“That’s because you— you— _ugh!_ You are the _worst!_ Adora, back me up here.” 

Adora, now seated on an empty bit of console with her legs swinging and her ponytail mussed and her eyes bright and her grin all wide like that, shrugs good-naturedly, a sort of _‘what did you expect?’_ in the motion. She’s so pretty there that Catra nearly gets up, but then Sparkles makes a frustrated sound, and that’s fun too. Plus, Catra _earned_ it - so, for the moment, she stays. And, because letting well enough alone is hard and Catra’s _winning_ today, she presses her advantage.

“Aw, come on Sparkles - you’re not mad about the rules, you’re mad I managed in a morning what you’ve been trying for days _.”_

“Ugh, I am _not!_ ”

“I can give you tips, if you’d like.”

“I don’t want _advice_ from you, Catra! Anyway, the only reason you managed it is because Adora _can’t stop making out with you_ and can I just say it’s _really annoying.”_

Catra chooses to ignore that.

“Here’s one for free,” she says instead, finding coolness nearly as easy as sarcasm when it gets Sparkles this worked up, “when brute force isn’t your forte,” (she ignores Adora’s _“hey!”_ ), “you gotta get creative. Play it _nice._ You know how to be nice, right?”

“That’s _hilarious_ coming from _you!”_ Sparkles stamps her foot. “And I _said_ I don’t need _tips!_ Especially not from you! I’m doing fine!”

“Really? Let me guess, you were ‘late’ this morning because you forgot, _again_ , that you can’t teleport in space.”

“What— no!” Sparkles in high defense mode - _bullseye_ , “I mean, of course not! No way, I—”

“Uh huh.” Catra says, enjoying the idle challenge of packing as much skepticism as possible into the sound. 

Bow comes in, then, with Melog at his heels. He takes one look at the tableau - Adora shaking with stifled laughter, Sparkles a red-faced whirl of angry glitter, Catra casually rearranging herself into a full-on lounge, back to an armrest and one leg kicked up on the seat. He then promptly turns around and walks out.

 _Coward_ , Catra thinks, and snickers when Sparkles shouts the same thing to his back. Catra shifts again, getting comfortable against the hard metal, letting her one leg swing against the chair’s base. It isn’t until Melog jumps into her lap that she catches why the position feels familiar.

Catra’s been in this chair before, she realizes abruptly, only then it was Adora’s sword in her lap and Scorpia at her side and the Crimson Waste laid out before her, a temptingly viable option, a throne her own spite would never let her keep.

She thinks about it, sometimes. And about the other throne, in the Fright Zone with Hordak broken at her feet. And about the one neither of them could measure up to, the fantasy throne she’d dreamed up as a kid beside Adora, the one that would always be beside Adora, the one that was _about_ being beside Adora. The one where it was them and just them and only them and everyone else on their knees and no one - not Shadow Weaver, not Hordak, not the evil enemy princesses - could stop them from doing whatever they wanted, going wherever they wanted, being whoever they wanted. Together. 

Catra failed at all three, and she thinks about it sometimes, dreams about a world in which she’d succeeded. And then she wakes in a cold sweat, because they’re nightmares, each and every one. 

Sparkles is bellowing, now, her ire turned on Bow as he shouts his replies from down the hall. Melog is purring, snuffling at Catra’s knee. Adora’s laughter drifts under the whole of it.

 _I win_ , Catra thinks again, and it has nothing to do with the chair at all. 

* * *

_“This...should be larger.”_

_“What was that, Hordak!?” Entrapta calls, voice echoing from where her whole upper half is under the console._

_“This.” Hordak gestures expansively at the captain’s chair, lip curled with disgust even though he knows Entrapta is unlikely to either hear his words or see his expression. “It is..." he searches for a word and finds merely, "...small. I could lead no empires from this throne.”_

_“Broth- I mean,_ Catra _has informed me that you ‘didn’t lead anything, just hid in your lab’ - is this not the case, Brother?” says the one called Wrong Hordak - no, now calling himself Humert, and before that Hardok, and before that Horzak. Entrapta has told Hordak that she has been informed that it is important to use only these names, however many there may be._

_Hordak does not like Humert, and he likes Catra even less. He considers crushing Humert’s windpipe; however, that would disappoint Entrapta. Instead, he crushes the tiny cup in his fist, and ceramic dust falls to the floor as the last of the apple juice runs down his arm. The experience is unsatisfying._

_He lowers his voice to a growl as he begins, “It is no—”_

_“Brothers!” Another voice - or the same voice from another entity, if one chooses to define it such - interrupts. “Are we able to assist?”_

_It is unfortunate that Hordak does not have another cup, as the urge for violence rears its head once more. It maintains its presence as the other...clones...attempt to provide their input._

_“There are seats at Bright Moon,” says the one calling himself Antoine, who has colored his hair orange, “that recline backwards when one leans into them.”_

_“And ones whose bottoms heat when you press a button,” Primrose’s eyes glow yet brighter pink when he adds, “it serves no utility, but— it is very...comfortable.”_

_Tugging at the knit scarf around his neck, Clonert suggests, “It would be quite possible to attach tubes here and—” upon reception of multiple hard gazes in a variety of colors, Clonert cowers, “—or spikes? Spikes would be good. Large, pointed spikes.” His terror is gratifying._

_The gratification is brief, as the rest of their - unnecessary, if not for Entrapta’s preferences, which are vital - “crew” provides unsolicited input._

_“If the height could be adjusted for different personages…”_

_“...a handheld rectangular device to control the…”_

_“...support drinking vessels. ‘Hot chocolate’ in particular is…”_

_“...as Brother Queen Glimmer described to me when…”_

_“...vibration capabilities…”_

_“Ah!” Entrapta’s voice brings great relief, and her face even greater. She bounds through the clustered...crewmembers...and slides to her knees in front of the chair, eyes bright with enthusiasm as her hands and hair run over its gleaming metal planes, “Ah! Yes! There are so many things I could—” a gleeful gasp, “—we could put in_ tiny niches _to store_ tiny food _! All I need to do is just...”_

_Entrapta’s pleasure is more gratifying even than Clonert’s fear, and Hordak is content - content? - yes, content to listen as she describes her plans, collecting a power saw from their supplies._

_Unfortunately, it is not to be. The young archer finds them shortly and shepherds them off the ship, chair regrettably unmodified. Hordak considers destroying the boy for his interruption, but Entrapta winds a tendril of hair and then her arm through his own and Hordak decides against expending the effort._

_Clinging to his side, Entrapta says, “Oh I know! When we get on Manny—”_

_“—Manny?”_

_“The ship Perfuma helped me salvage from Prime’s wreckage! I wanted to call her Maureen or Katie but Humert has never named a ship, so I let him do it! Her full name is Emancipation.”_

_“Ah. That is. Good.” It is not, but Entrapta is smiling, so it will have to be._

_“Anyway, when we get on Manny, we can make sure you have a_ huge _chair! A red one! With niches for_ tiny food _!”_

_“That would be nice.”_

* * *

_“...and your mother - your_ mother _\- doesn’t even blink. She just goes all snobby and goes up to him like ‘_ oh dear, whatever is wrong? _'...like she’s totally innocent! Like it wasn’t_ her idea _to begin with!”_

“Oh no!"Glimmer covers her face with her hands, scandalized and smiling as her dad continues.

 _“And I’m just standing there, absolutely mortified, trying_ so hard _to be kingly...I’d only been king for three weeks! I didn’t know_ how _to be kingly!”_

They both break off into new peals of laughter. 

Her dad’s laugh isn’t quite right, slightly tinny and distorted where it comes out of the smaller, secondary speakers of the captain’s chair, but Glimmer thinks it’s good enough. Considering the overtaxed system of long-range communication relays they’d set up to get it to Darla at all, she’s happy just hear him - and she can indeed hear him clearly when he catches his breath, continuing with a low, enthusiastic, “ _But! That’s not the worst part.”_

“What?!” Glimmer wails, legs kicking over the other arm of the chair, “How is that _not_ the worst part!?” 

“ _The worst part is...he’s still on the diplomatic team._ ”

“No!” Glimmer gasps, laughter coming in fresh again, “No way! Did he _see_ you?”

“ _Of course not! I hid behind an ice sculpture…and then snuck out. I can never go back to the Kingdom of Snows. We’ll have to come up with an excuse for Frosta.”_

Glimmer giggles, “Dad! It was _decades_ ago _!_ He’s gotta be over it by now!” 

_“_ Ten hedgehogs _, Glimmer! Ten hedgehogs and a wheel of cheese bigger than your head! No way is he over it! I know_ I’m _not over it!”_

When their laughter has drifted into giggles and then down to the occasional chuckle, Glimmer takes a deep breath. She lets the breath out, but she’s still smiling when she says, “Okay, okay. Back to business. Speaking of - how _is_ Frosta?”

Her father’s voice goes serious, and she appreciates that. “Alright, mostly. The Kingdom of Snows is handling the whole ice-kingdom-now-covered-in-flowers thing pretty well. Perfuma’s about halfway through her survey of Etheria, and so far she thinks She-Ra’s whole thing did a good job of...suiting plant to climate, I guess? She says it’s more like it encouraged more of what was already present, which is good. You were right - the survey was a good idea.”

“Yeah,” Glimmer sighs, somehow unsettled despite the praise. She pinpoints it as, “Only halfway through? I thought she’d gotten further along - it’s been a while.”

“A few months, yeah. A little more? How long have you been in space, again?” 

This happens sometimes, and there’s a bittersweetness to the way her dad asks her for numbers when he can’t quite keep hours and days straight. It’s the same way she feels knowing he calls her when the Bright Moon castle feels a bit too loud, or he needs to make sure she’s alive and grown up and unharmed, needs to make sure that he didn’t lose her entirely to time or tech-facilitated despair or his own hands wielding darkened magic. And Glimmer calls him, too, to vent or to cry or to ask about her mom or to explain another thing she needs him to know he missed, needs him to stop having missed, needs him to know is part of her. He apologizes, sometimes, and so does she - they’re trying to stop that, because they’ve decided not to regret it, not to begrudge themselves or each other both sadness and support. To be honest with each other, to give each other their complete stories. They’ve already missed enough.

Glimmer rattles off a few numbers, more precise. It’s longer than his estimate, but not by as much as it could be. 

Her dad takes it in, then says, “oh, yeah, that makes sense. I mean, Sea Hawk and Mermista have been helping with waterways whenever they can, which speeds things up, but...it’s the whole planet, baby girl. It takes time.”

Glimmer presses her lips together, feels her fingernails try and fail to dig into the smooth metal of the armrest. She quells the urge to hit the control panel in frustration and tries to organize her thoughts to respond neutrally, but her silence must be too long because her dad’s voice comes again, “Glimmer? Are you okay?”

Honesty, she reminds herself. And so she says quietly, “It shouldn’t.”

“Sweetie? I’m not following.” 

“It wouldn’t take time...for Perfuma to visit everywhere,” Glimmer says, and she knows her voice is as tight as her fingers, as the vise around her stomach, “if I’d stayed there. If I was teleporting her.” 

Her dad is quiet. Then he says, still quietly, “No, I suppose it wouldn’t.”

Glimmer curls into herself, legs and arms pulling into the confines of the chair. She looks around nervously and wonders if it was the right idea to take this call on the very-much-not-private bridge. But everyone’s busy, she knows (well, Adora and Bow are busy - Catra’s probably asleep, because Catra can’t be bothered to get up till noon half the time). So she sighs, long and hard, and finally lets out the question in what she knows is a pathetically tiny voice. “Dad, was this a mistake?”

“Glimmer—”

“Going into _space_ , I mean. So soon after, after all of it. Did I— dad,” she feels pressure build behind her eyes and she closes them to hold it in, but she can hear her own voice thicken as she says, “dad, did I fuck up? Like, _really_ fuck up?” 

“No, Glimmer.” The words are unhesitating. He adds, “what you’re doing out there, what you and your friends have chosen to do - it’s important. It’s vital. We know how to handle ourselves down here, it just takes time - you’re the one doing the big scary part. There’s a whole universe out there, now, and you’re...you’re making us part of it. Restoring magic to it. Making it better, too.”

The words are pretty, but they make her feel worse. She talks around the lump in her throat, “I know, dad. And you’re _right_ , but it’s just. I-I know what _we_ are doing, but, but, but what am _I_ doing? I, I can’t teleport, I can’t do magic, I can’t help with the ship, and - and dad, the ship’s a _mess_!” 

“Wait, what? Glimmer, what’s up with the ship?”

“We went through this _stupid_ asteroid field in the _stupid_ void of _stupid_ space!”

“An...asteroid field. Glimmer, I know I won’t understand the answer to this, but - where did you say you say you’re heading?”

“I _didn’t!”_ The bite of gut-deep frustration is all too familiar, _“_ the Star Siblings gave us all these _maps_ and, and, and we’re supposed to cross into a new quadrant, look for some of the planets they can’t introduce us to, but, like, it’s not like I know _where we are!_ Or how we’re _getting there!_ Every time I ask or we talk about it we get distracted and it’s not like it _matters_ if I know because why _would it—"_

“Baby girl—”

"—because it’s not like I can _help!"_ Finally - inevitably - it comes up like a river undammed, the swirl of emotion in her gut and throat and stomach and fingers and eyes spilling over into tears, “And Adora and I have this _stupid game_ with this _stupid chair_ and it’s really, really fun even if I lose _all the time_ , but also sometimes it’s _not_ because Adora’s, like, the ship _likes_ her better and she can read all the stupid space writing and she can _actually use magic_. And Bow is fixing everything and I wish I could help _him_ for once but I’m _shit_ at all the technology stuff, dad, and Catra— Catra’s just Catra she doesn’t even _care_ about being helpful! But _I do_ and I’m _useless_! The only time I can even win a _stupid chair contest_ is when Adora’s off doing something _necessary_ because she and Bow are always doing ship stuff and, and, and—” 

Glimmer lets out first one sob, then another, gasping words between them, “and all I’ve ever done in space has been get kidnapped and captured. I’m the queen of a _nation,_ dad, but Bright Moon is _galaxies_ away and I really love Adora I do but it’s _her_ ship and—” Glimmer chokes off into another sob and hates that she sounds as small as she feels when she says, “I’m no good in space, dad.” 

“Glimmer.” Her dad says, and then a pause. Even through the snot and the tears and the frustration, Glimmer is aware that he’s collecting himself, that he’s parsing what she’s said and deciding how best to respond, trying to see if he _can_ respond. Because he doesn’t know what he’s doing, either.

It’s a strange thought, obvious and yet new. It’s the newness that throws her years back, to a memory of standing at the foot of her mother’s throne, arguing fiercely against a retreat order and blazing with the conviction that her mother had too much certainty and none of the answers. Somehow, despite all that Glimmer has done and seen since then, it’s this moment - hanging tight to the sound of her father’s voice, because even if _he_ doesn’t trust whatever he has to say, _she_ does - that makes the girl in her memory feel so very young. 

“Glimmer,” her dad says again, and this time moves on to, “listen, I know it can feel like—”

The ship jostles, and the comms cut to static.

“Dad? Dad!?” Glimmer scrambles around, dashing the wet mess off her face with both hands and the edge of her cape as she pushes to her knees. She finds that the flashlight she’d used to keep the respond button pressed down has rolled onto the floor, and shoves her finger on the button instead, “Dad?! Dad, can you hear me?” 

She takes her finger off, hoping against hope that somehow her transmission is interfering with his, but all she’s met with is more static. 

Glimmer is tapping frantically at the chair’s control panel to re-route back to the main console’s full communications array - hoping that will somehow fix the issue - when something else rocks the ship.

It’s bigger this time, and Glimmer grabs at the chair’s arm and back to keep her balance against the tumble of it. The lights flicker, briefly, and if Glimmer screams a little it’s no one’s business but her own. 

“Glimmer!”

And her boyfriend’s.

“Bow! Bow, what’s going on?” Glimmer shouts, and then Bow’s running in, holding her tight.

She presses her face into his shirt. She’s so used to his arms stabilizing her world that it takes her a second to realize the ship is no longer shaking. 

He puts his hands on her shoulders, pushing her away just to look at her face. “Glimmer, are you okay?”

“It’s the comms,” she says, breathlessly, “I was talking to my dad and it just went all,” she tries to make the static noise and likes when it makes him quirk a smile. 

But the smile drops fast, and Bow groans, eyes closing and head dropping forward for only a second before he’s brushing past her to the console. He starts up a back-and-forth with Darla that leaves Glimmer reeling, and all at once she realizes that she’s just...standing damp-cheeked on the bridge next to a chair too big for her, watching Bow do his very best to keep their spaceship in the air and not understanding a word he says.

She’s useless.

Again.

She swallows hard, once again hates the way her voice sounds when she asks, “Can I...help?”

Bow doesn’t seem to hear her, still engaged with the spaceship. Darla’s voice is, as always, placid and artificial; Bow’s waving arms and frenzied tone suggest it’s not going well. 

“Bow,” she says, and this time he looks up. It doesn’t feel like a victory, but she still asks, firmly, “can I help?”

Bow lets out a long breath, throws her a smile. “I love you, but I don’t think you can,” he sounds grateful and casual and absent, and while the first of his words warm her to her core, that core fills with frustration all over again when he taps an earpiece he already has on, says into it, “Adora? Adora, do you read?” A few seconds, and then, “Darn it! Not these too…”

Glimmer bites her lip. “I can take a message, if none of the comms are working,” she tries.

“Ugh, no, thanks, but,” Bow turns back to the console, prizing off a panel Glimmer hadn’t even known existed to look at the lights and wires beneath it, “if that bump was from the asteroid damage - and I don’t know what it could be - it shouldn’t be doing anything to our comms unless the asteroids had some weird properties. I’m going to need to talk to Adora about what they’re made of.”

Glimmer tamps down her ire, tries to keep her voice even when she asks, “Why would Adora know that?”

“Huh? Uh, she had the field all spec’d out. Made the call on it.”

“Wait, what?” Glimmer asks, frustration briefly giving way to confusion, “I thought the asteroid field was on the route the Star Siblings gave us?”

“Oh, _no_.” Bow groans, and it takes Glimmer a beat to realize it’s about the communications panel, not her. He drops down, unclipping a flashlight from his belt and putting his head to the floor to peer under the console. His voice is distracted as he finally answers, “Uh, no - their charts out here were pretty bad; they haven’t gone out this far. Adora’s been charting for weeks.”

The words don’t connect in her head immediately. When they do, it’s _‘ weeks’_ that gets stuck there, bouncing in frenzied circles past confusion, past frustration, and into sparking, crackling anger. It’s through her teeth that she grinds out, “She _has?_ ”

Bow is so preoccupied he barely even seems to be paying attention to his own words, let alone Glimmer’s tone. He says, “Yeah she’s, uh, been passing me routing orders.” And then, still distracted, “Didn’t she mention it?”

Glimmer wants to shout. She wants to scream and rage and snarl - and she could. And Bow would drop his flashlight and he’d hold her close or let her pace, whichever she needs, and he’d ask all the right questions, and he’d give her really good advice because he’s Bow and that’s what he does. 

Except - he should be doing that already. He _would_ be doing that already, normally, because normally he’d notice she was off the minute he walked into the room, and even through her anger Glimmer knows it’s concerning that he didn’t. It’s concerning the way he’s muttering at the communications array, the way the dark shadows under his eyes keep getting that much darker because the ship needs fixing and he’s Bow and that’s what he does, too. 

So she doesn’t shout. She doesn’t scream, or rage, or snarl. She takes that crackling mass of anger and shoves it into a ball in her chest, locks it tight with the same control that keeps her voice even. Because she is Queen Glimmer of Bright Moon, and if she can take down twenty Horde clones at once and can outplay the closest bid anyone has ever come to conquering all of Etheria - seriously, if it wasn’t so fraught, she’d lord that over Catra _constantly_ \- and can battle her own super-powerful, dark-magic wielding, brainwashed father, she can manage to keep her feelings to herself, for once. Even if it’s from Bow, who’s been her best friend forever, who is still her best friend in the universe just as much as he is the man she’s in love with. She can do that, for him. 

Right? 

“No.” She says instead of shouting, and is genuinely glad when Bow doesn’t seem to catch the edge to it, “no, she didn’t.”

* * *

_Darla is made up of certainties, of wires and metal bits and numbers and flashing lights._ _She has names for these things, hardcoded in so she can know what to call them: hallway, console, shield, engine, fuel, hull, chair, sensors, administrator._

_Her own name, Darla, is new. It gives her something to call herself; this is useful. If Darla understood the concept, she might say she liked it._

_Darla is also, right now, crashed through the wall of a designated-hostile zone. Darla is also, right now, broken._

_“Shields at thirty percent,” Darla’s diagnostic systems tell her to say, and she does._

_Darla’s sensors detect something (new and old and known and unidentifiable) in her hallways._

_“Hull compromised. Interspace travel not recommended.”_

_The entity moves through the bridge, past the administrator’s chair, to the console._

_Darla’s emergency protocols tell her to activate the alarms, and so she does._

_The entity touches Darla’s user interface, and—_

_Recognition surges through Darla’s systems. So does something else._

_“Administrator detected,” Darla’s sensory system tells her, and so she adds, “Hello, She-Ra.”_

_It is not power, not exactly. It is not fuel, and it is not maintenance and repairs. What solders her together, takes a hold of her wires - it’s not a torch or a wrench or a hand or a tendril of hair. It is bright, and it is strong, and it is true._

_“Hey, Darla.” The Administrator - She-Ra - says._

_If Darla knew what to call it, she’d call it healing. If Darla knew what to call it, she’d call it magic. If Darla knew what to call it, she’d call it love._

_She does not know what to call it._

_“Get us out of here,” She-Ra says._

_And, against the stated capacity of her every technical system, Darla does._

* * *

“Darla, can you call Entrapta, please?”

“ _Attempting to contact starship_ Emancipation.” 

The dial tone cuts quickly to static and Adora groans, hitting a button on the chair’s control panel to switch the very much still broken comms off manually. It’s not the first time she’s done this today, mind snagging on a science question and then reflexively attempting to use the very system she can't fix. It's very frustrating. 

She decides she’ll never take long-range communications for granted ever again, glaring at the floating, holographic image of an asteroid before her. She’ll especially never take the long-range connection to Entrapta for granted, not even when Scorpia says it’s Adora’s turn to do the _Emancipation_ ’s monthly morality check-in. 

In fact, she decides, she’ll even volunteer to do check-in this month. Just as soon as she gets communications back. 

She sticks her tongue out at the asteroid, hating it. Adora’s not the best at science, not at all, but she’s meticulously looked up every single item in this thing’s composition to determine what could possibly have impacted their communications array, and it makes no sense. It shouldn’t be a problem. She doesn’t know what to do next. That last thought sits with her, frustrated and sharp and familiar, like the jagged edges of a broken sword. 

She takes a deep breath, and turns her attention. 

To her right, another hologram hangs at eye-height, this one a purple star chart sphere. There’s a growing list of planets beside it, and that’s what Adora focuses on now, getting back to the painstaking process of tapping each known planet’s symbol with her stylus, checking it as an option to land and find fuel and make repairs. She doesn’t like working with the computer on this - its maps of this area are partial and wildly outdated and intangible. Her own charts aren’t that much better, but she much prefers the tactility of paper, the way she can organize information in patterns the computer’s programming refuses to allow her. She also just...doesn’t like holograms. Especially when they tell her what to do. 

But: she’s running out of options. Each planet she checks is a bust, too, and Adora once again curses Darla’s ancient, flukey autopilot - one hit and it had been out and they hadn’t been _ready_ \- but she curses herself more. _She_ should have been ready _._ She should have planned it better. She should have—

It doesn’t matter what she should have done; it matters what she did. It matters that she’s going to fix it.

It’s a testament to her preoccupation that she doesn’t notice the smell of coffee, rich and dark and warm, until it’s nearly upon her, and it’s only then that she comes out of it enough to catch the industrial grey mug out of the corner of her eye. Better still, it’s held in a claw-tipped hand and Catra has two mugs and Adora absently puts her stylus down on the chair’s arm to reach for the one closer to her.

Catra pulls it away. 

Adora jolts in her seat, attention fully drawn away from the charts now, “Wha—”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Catra doesn’t sound sorry at all. She walks right past without stopping, tail lashing at Adora’s knees as the whole combination - smell and mugs and smarmy girlfriend - clicks pleasantly into Adora’s brain, “did you think this was for _you_?”

Adora glares, though she also feels an unexpected ache in her shoulders where they start to relax - she hadn’t even noticed they were tense. She lets herself droop just a little, lets herself whine, “But you have _two!”_

Catra grins, all teeth, and very deliberately lifts one mug in a toast. “Coffee,” she declares condescendingly, and then delicately places the second mug by the navigation panel, identifying it in the same tone as, “water.” She turns back around fully, facing Adora and leaning against the starboard console. She takes a long, indulgent sip from the first mug before concluding brightly, “I’m developing healthy habits!” 

Catra flutters her lashes. Adora throws a stylus at her, and the way Catra dodges her mug up and snickers ruins any possible semblance of innocence. 

“You know,” Catra adds, picking up the stylus and turning back to the console, “there’s a nearly full pot in the galley.”

Adora perks up. “Would you…” she doesn’t finish her thought, but does fix a pleading look at Catra’s back. 

Catra glances over her shoulder, arch. “Want me to call you captain, too?” 

Adora feels herself flush, but she still manages to cock an eyebrow, knowing that Catra isn’t looking but also that she’s about to. She bites her lip, steels herself, then lets her voice go low when she says, “That could be fun.”

Catra’s ears give her away, perking up as she tenses, barely. And then she does indeed look back over her shoulder again, eyes this time taking a long, languorous slide up and down Adora. Adora tries not to make it obvious the way she straightens in her chair, how she places her feet flat on the ground and makes her hands sit firm on the rests and wishes a little that she was She-Ra so she could fill out the chair’s spaciousness that much more. Adora likes - _really_ likes - the casual heat of Catra’s gaze, and likes almost as much how easy it is for that heat to fade a bit, go unserious. How effortlessly Catra’s look drifts from lascivious to teasing when she replies, “Hmm. Nah. Get it yourself.” 

Adora missed this, the playfulness. She’s had it back for months, had it with this new and brilliant edge that sets her alight in the best way, but she still thinks it sometimes with a hard pang of unnecessary, retroactive longing: she missed this. 

She’d kind of still like the coffee, though. 

Adora groans, “I _can’t_ ,” she protests, eyeing her holograms.

“Still playing that game, are you?” 

Oh, right. That. “Still losing to the nav screen, huh?” Adora says, snide, and immediately feels bad. She knows it’s a frustration that has nothing to do with Catra at all.

Not that it seems to bother her; Catra just turns, throws the stylus back. Adora catches it before it hits her forehead, sticks out her tongue, chuckles at Catra’s exaggerated responding leer. Catra turns back to the console, and it’s almost immediately that she’s muttering angrily ( _“enter your own fucking destination, asshole”_ ). 

Adora tries to return to her star chart, but the hologram's semi-transparency just has her looking at the lithe, controlled angles of Catra-frustrated all over again. It’s not a hard choice. 

“You hear about the comms?”

“Adora, it’s been hours,” Catra replies, distracted, giving the console a bit of a kick as she presses a few more buttons, “‘course I have.”

“Oh,” it hadn't felt that long, “you doing okay?”

“Oh yeah. Arrow Boy’ll figure it out,” Catra snickers, “plus, Sparkles is in a snit about it, which is kinda fun.”

That makes Adora pull into herself, feet drawing up on the chair and arms wrapping around her legs. The words come unbidden when she blurts out, “I think she’s mad at me.”

“Huh?”

“Glimmer. We talked earlier, and she was...snippy. And I think she’s mad. At me.” 

“Alternatively, she’s mad about the comms and not everything’s about you.”

“I know, I know, of course it’s not, but I think maybe this...is. It seemed...pointed. And I don’t know _why_.” She looks at Catra, who is looking back now, and she knows it’s plaintive and maybe a bit pathetic when she asks, “ _Why_ is she _mad_ at me?” 

“You’re asking me to understand Sparkles?” Catra makes a disgusted noise in the back of her throat, “Sorry, Adora, you’re on your own with this one.” 

The words are offhand, flippant, but something about them catches in Adora’s gut. She knows it translates to her face, because Catra’s goes a little stricken, and then reluctant, and finally hesitant. 

“I don’t mean that.” Catra says softly, steps over to where Adora is curled in the chair and clambers up to sit on the armrest, pressing the button to disappear Adora’s holograms and propping her bare feet on the chair’s seat. She presses fingers through the poof of hair at the crown of Adora’s head, and the blunt softness of them tells Adora she’s retracted her claws for the gesture, “You’re not on your own. Not for anything.”

Adora breathes the words in like air, drops her forehead to Catra’s knee, lets herself focus on nothing but the solid reality of fingers against her scalp. She feels another pressure, lighter, as Catra leans down to press a conciliatory kiss to her hair. If she could, Adora would breathe that in, too, but she keeps her face buried instead.

“I just don’t know what to do.” Adora murmurs into Catra’s leg, and it’s about Glimmer and it’s also about everything else. She knows it’s not fair, putting this on Catra, but— well, there’s no ‘but’ there, so “I’m sorry,” she adds, “I shouldn’t be putting this on you.”

Catra’s hand freezes where it’s fiddling with the loose part of Adora’s hair, and then she huffs a chuckle, back in motion a second later, “Oh, no, yeah, you shouldn’t,” she says, voice wry, “No way. You’re so _needy_ ,” Adora’s stomach drops, and when she looks up quick to meet Catra’s eyes, they’re narrowed, “You know, as opposed to me, a model of independent stability who has never needed your support at all.” 

Okay, point taken. Adora gives a rueful little laugh and concentrates on the warmth in the tilt of Catra’s lips and the weight of her fingers and the steadiness of her eyes and props her chin on Catra’s knee and says, because it’s true, “I love you.”

Catra always looks a little surprised when she hears it, and she doesn’t always say it back. Adora thought, for a while, that it was because Catra was still getting used to talking about her feelings. But those words seem to be the one exception to Catra’s struggle with feelings; she says them so freely so often...Adora’s come to the conclusion that when Catra doesn’t say _I love you,_ it’s because she’s convinced Adora already knows.

And, well, there was a time when that would have been a problem. There was a time when that _was_ a problem, when it was only the barest fraction of the problem, when Adora would lie in bed night after night after night and mourn how easy the thing she’d built with Catra had been to break, right down to its core. Adora remembers with vivid clarity a time when she would look at Catra across a battlefield, or stare through a bot’s camera, or feel claws at her back, and be struck dumb by how utterly and frighteningly fragile they had turned out to be. 

Now, though? Catra’s right, it turns out - Adora knows. The way they love each other is, she’s decided, probably the most unfragile thing either of them has ever owned. They can kick it and beat it and ignore it and throw it off a cliff and take it in both hands and bend and bend and strain and it won’t tear. It won’t shatter, or fracture, or even crack. They’ve tried, over years and ways.

So it doesn’t bother her when Catra just hums a little in response, tugs at Adora’s hair tie, pulls out her ponytail and begins industriously finger-combing through the loose hairs around her face and neck in preparation for a new one. Catra tugs at a stubborn tangle, a bit, and Adora winces and Catra gentles oh-so-fast, and Adora thinks that what they’ve decided to do, these days - like each other as much as they love each other? That’s more difficult. Delicate, sometimes. 

It makes Adora happier than she has ever been.

(Even, yes, with the ship falling apart and Glimmer’s cold shoulder and the weirdly stressful empty spot where Adora’s life has always held an enemy and now holds only space, vast and open and full of partial maps instead of clear directives. Adora’d never known, before this, that she could hold happiness so firmly in tandem with anxiety, neither making the other lesser and both just - there. But then, Catra has a way of making Adora’s brain do strange things. 

Though less anxiety would still be better. For instance: if she had somewhere for them to go. 

And if Glimmer wasn’t mad.)

“She just keeps sniping at me about, like, the thing with Darla’s lights, and, I don’t know…” Adora thinks back, leaning into it when Catra smooths fingers over her forehead, “...I told her I needed a time out so I could use the chair for star charts, and she was just so _cold_ about it.” 

Catra’s eyes narrow again, and she opens her mouth - then closes it. Adora is wondering what sharp thing Catra has decided against when she says, “Sparkles needs to get her shit together.”

“That’s not—”

“No, Adora. She does.” Catra’s eyes slide off hers, moving to the crown of Adora’s head as she massages at the skull-ache released by removing Adora’s ponytail, “Look, maybe you’re right - you know her better than I do, and if you think she’s being all sparkle-sparkle-glitter-bitchy in your direction, I believe you. But unless you did something to her - and you didn’t, I know you didn’t, because you’re _Adora_ and we’re all trapped in this metal box together so I know you _didn’t_ \- you won’t help by feeding into her bullshit,” a brief smile, “and that’s from an expert in having bullshit.”

“But—” Adora starts.

“No, really, you do anything to her?”

Adora thinks hard about her own actions and Glimmer’s recent passive aggression. “I don’t think so,” she says.

“You never trust yourself, you know that? You know what you’re doing, Adora. Listen to your gut and let Sparkles sort her own shit out.” Catra taps her finger to the center of Adora’s forehead, and for all she doesn’t need to hear it, it feels like _I love you, too._

The warmth of it freezes over when Catra adds, “Anyway, I’m the only one allowed to make fun of your dumb nerdy star charts.” 

Catra must see something on her face, because a moment later she’s abandoning Adora’s hair to cup her chin instead, brow furrowed, “Adora? Is there something else?”

Yes, there is. Adora’s about to say it, here in the safe little bubble of space Catra has made, when she hears a scoff from behind them. 

“Really? Again?” They both turn to see Glimmer, standing in the entrance to the bridge with her hands on her hips and an annoyed expression twisting her face. Adora’s stomach drops.

“Hi, Glimmer,” she tries, untangling from Catra and unfolding herself into a proper seat. 

“What is she now, psychic?” Catra mutters under her breath. Adora would kick her if she could; settles for squeezing her ankle, hard. 

Glimmer looks, if anything, more annoyed still. “You know, I _thought_ you needed the chair for something _important_.” She stomps past them, breaking her glare only to begin slamming console compartments open and rummaging inside.

Adora swallows hard and attempts pleasantness, “Oh, yeah, uh. Getting some work done. Whatchya looking for?” The brush of her own still-loose hair at her ears makes her feel even more awkward. Off-kilter.

Glimmer doesn’t look up, but the rummaging somehow gets angrier, and she ignores the question entirely, “Work, huh? Making any _big important_ _decisions_? Is that the work you’re doing?”

Adora’s confused. And she’s about to express it, but Catra gets there first. 

“What is your _problem_?” Catra asks, and no, no, no. Adora didn’t want _this_. 

“My problem? _My_ problem?” Glimmer gets up, turns, and that’s when Adora realizes her friend has been spoiling for a fight for the whole day.

She doesn’t know how she missed it, but now it’s all she can see. Because if Glimmer wants a fight, Catra’s about to give her one.

“Yeah, your problem,” Catra snarls, leaping over the arm of the chair to stalk forward, “you got ears on your sparkly princess head?”

“ _Queen,_ ” Glimmer hisses, “and my problem, _Catra,_ is that I don’t like being kept in the dark!”

“The fuck are you talking about?”

“Glimmer—” Adora stands, hoping to keep the peace, but it backfires when Glimmer rounds on her.

“Don’t you _Glimmer_ me! _You’re_ the one who’s _doing it!_ ” 

“Doing _what_?” Adora snaps, because Catra’s right - this is ridiculous, “I didn’t do _anything_ to you, Glimmer, I don’t even know what you’re—”

Glimmer gives a bitter little laugh, “Didn’t _do_ anything?! No, no, Adora, you _do_ everything! Like, like it doesn’t even _occur_ to you that _anyone else_ could - _ugh!_ You know I thought we were done with this, but—”

“Done with _what_?” Adora asks with an exasperated shout. 

Glimmer throws her hands in the air, “Done with _you_ and your whole, your, your stupid _control_ _thing_! You think it’s _good_ , these stupid _power trips_ —”

“Hey, lay _off_.” Catra slides half between them, and if she was snarling before she’s livid now.

“I will _not_ lay off! Not when Adora decided _all by herself_ we needed to _break_ the _ship_!”

Adora’s blood freezes. But it also boils, because, “It’s not like I did it on _purpose_! And I’m going to fix it!” 

“Oh! And now you’re going to _fix it!_ _All by yourself_ , I bet!” 

Adora barely notices Catra between them, vision tunneled into Glimmer’s anger and Glimmer’s sharp, angry words, “Yes, Glimmer, _by myself_ , it’s not my problem if you have _—”_

Glimmer shouts over her, “This is your _fault_ , Adora, just because you _always_ have to _—_ ”

Catra’s shouting now, too, barely audible over Glimmer’s and Adora’s own voices, all loud and loud and loud in Adora’s ears, “Don’t talk to her like that! I don’t care what _—”_

 _“—_ some stupid inferiority complex you need to work out on _—"_

 _“—_ in charge of _everything_ and now, what, you think that’s _—”_

 _“—_ the fuck you think is going on, you better back the fuck _—”_

The room goes dark.

Glimmer’s shouts drop off into a gasp. Adora’s own breath catches, words tangling into silence in her throat. 

“ _—_ off.” Catra’s voice rings loud in the sudden stillness. 

It echoes. Fades. 

And then, for a long moment, nothing. Almost nothing. Adora’s breath again, panting; her own heart in her ears, still pounding with adrenaline. A stuttered gasp from beside her, she doesn’t know from whom. And every single light on the bridge - out. 

Finally, Glimmer breaks the quiet, voice a low, shaky hiss. “What the _fuck,_ Adora,” she says. And then, even shakier, as if she’s almost hoping it’s something as trivial as “You already have the stupid chair!”

Adora feels a surge of indignation, but it’s overwhelmed quickly by a larger one of fear as she replies, “...that wasn’t me.”

“What - Darla, lights on!” Glimmer says, and when they stay off she growls, “Adora...Adora, talk to your stupid ship.”

Adora looks around the room to see - no light. Nothing but the dim glow of the stars outside the window and Melog, huddled small and half-hidden and spiky at Catra’s feet. It’s not just the artificial ship’s twilight that’s off, either; it’s the lights at the console and the soft ones between the panels on the floor and even the emergency footlights she’s seen once or twice. Nothing is beeping, and the stuttering hum of the engines has dropped to a brand of silence that chills Adora through. 

She says, “Darla, lights on.”

The lights stay off.

Panic wells in Adora’s throat, and she knows it’s mirrored in Glimmer’s quick breaths, the wideness of Catra’s glow-in-the-dark eyes, Catra’s fist that at some point has clenched in Adora’s jacket.

Adora’s voice shakes. 

“Darla...Darla, are you there?”

There’s no reply.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part II is most of the way done but I gotta commune with it a little longer before I can allow it into the world. 
> 
> For the record, another reason this fic exists is that I asked myself “if i wrote a spop star trek AU, what roles would everyone take?” I struggled, especially with captain, and then I decided that the squad themselves would probably also struggle with the question. Over the course of writing this I did come up with an answer I'm happy with, and i’ll post it at the end of next chapter...in the meantime, feel free to lmk your thoughts. (Fair warning: my answer is absolutely, unrepentantly a cheat.)


	2. Chapter 2

* * *

_Here at the end of the universe, Mara is alone._

_Her hands press firm to the console, and she says, “You’re not Light Hope."_

_“I am the same basic operating system,” The Thing That Is Not Light Hope replies._

_Mara thinks of the real Light Hope, of Squadron Grayskull and their doomed bravery, of her friends and family still on Eternia. She thinks of enemies, too, in sickly green and shimmering gold. The enemies you point your sword at; the ones who put it in your hand._

_It is with firm conviction that she says, “You’re not her, and you don’t get to tell me what my destiny is.”_

_She presses another button, and The Thing That Is Not Light Hope is gone._

_It is with shaking fingers and a heavy heart that Mara enters her next command into the system, and as she does, she looks at the stars. She thinks of how they light up the sky and point the way home. She thinks of Eternia’s bright cities and of so many other planets orbiting those tiny pinpricks of light - the underwater wonders of Aquarii, the harsh mountains of Eridani, the newly discovered and as-yet unexplored mysteries of Krytis. She thinks of nights spent on her back in the grass, picking out constellation after familiar constellation, deciding idly where she’d let them take her next._

_“Activating portal into the dimension of Despondos in three, two—”_

_Mara says goodbye to the universe._

_“—one.”_

_And then, she is alone._

_And so is Etheria._

_And there is one thing left to do._

_Mara presses a few buttons on the interface and steps back, holds her stance as strong and firm as she wishes she felt. When she begins to speak, she faces the holo-recorder, the empty bridge, the now starless space beyond it. She faces a name from a crazy old woman, an ally she will never meet, a successor she does not want, a future she is trying to avert. Maybe, if she’s succeeded, she faces no one at all._

_Maybe, if she’s lucky, she faces a friend._

_“Adora,” she says, “I know you’re there. Razz said you would be there.”_

_She tries to hold her hand out to— what? She does not know, but here she falters, pain shooting through her side as she feels the ship begin its final plummet. When she falls back into the chair - from which she has commanded armies, from which she has led research expeditions, in which she has slept and ate and joked and_ lived - _its metal frame is colder than she has ever felt._

_“I don’t have much time. I barely made it out. If you are seeing this, it means you are the new She-Ra.”_

_Mara thinks of herself. Of parties in the flourishing new town of Plumeria, of watching the animals in the Whispering Woods, of a pie she’d like to help make._

_She says goodbye to Etheria, too._

_“It means I failed.”_

* * *

Before this, before the power went out and the ship fell to pieces and the asteroid field and liftoff, back when they’d been four friends who just saved their world lying on the grass and laughing about road trips, Bow had already known the hardest part of space would be the silence. 

He’d known it from experience, by then. Before _any_ of this - Horde Prime and the Alliance and Adora and a little blip on his tracker that would turn out to be a sword - if he’d even been able to imagine space at all, he would have expected the worst of it to be homesickness. The standing ache of leaving his family and friends for who-knows-how-long; the strange, ironclad impossibility of even a quick visit, just to check in. 

But the Bow who left Etheria for this trip had been in space before, so he already knew it would be the silence. He’d remembered Adora’s brooding quiet times and then, when she’d joined them, Glimmer’s, and then - worse still than either of theirs - Catra’s. People get all stuck in the dark corners of their heads when it’s quiet, all tangled up, and Bow - born and bred in the most bustling of households - will swear by the curative powers of positive babble and optimistic phrases, kind words and the clattering of metal, nervous chatter and soothing noises and little hums of active listening. Bow likes to tease out tangles, draw thoughts into the air where they can be laid flat and looked at out loud. Bow’s spent a lot of time with a flashlight in his hand, these days; he knows how hard it is to fix something you can’t even see.

The homesickness is bad, sure. But the silence is where the homesickness lives. And the dread, and everything else that tangles in his head, too.

And yet, the silence of space has never been like this. 

There’s no purr of engines, no soft beeping from the console. No sporadic whirr of the navigation panel re-configuring, no Darla’s voice proclaiming ‘ _call incoming_.’ Everyone but Bow is long since in bed, parted with barely-contained anger and passive-aggressive snipes and sharp, tersely stated intentions to try again, try more, try something else tomorrow (or what passes for it, with Darla’s programmed daycycle broken). 

Nothing but Bow and his too-loud footsteps and his stale, tepid coffee and tonight’s heavy tangle of newfound, nagging dread.

And apparently - Bow stops as he turns the corner, blinking in surprise - Catra. 

She’s on a ledge at the starboard side of the bridge’s forward viewport, lit by starlight from one side and Melog's blue-and-red glow in her lap. She has one leg curled up on the flat surface and the other stretched in front of her, and if it weren’t for her fingers methodically carding through Melog’s mane, she’d be entirely still; she is certainly entirely silent. It should be peaceful, the way she’s sitting there. Bow finds that it’s not at all. 

He tries to reboot his half-asleep brain. Like with everything else on this ship, he’s pretty sure it doesn’t work, but - like with everything else on this ship - he steels himself to check on her.

He crosses the bridge cautiously, careful of his mug, feeling his way over the smooth flooring and past the captain’s chair by the thin light of his flashlight and Melog’s glow. He stops once to toss the earpiece communicators - his original errand - in a console compartment, then makes his way to the window. He hesitates when he reaches it.

“Hey,” he says, soft. Catra’s eyes flicker his way and back to the stars; she otherwise doesn’t acknowledge him.

He sits down anyway, perching on the other side of the ledge, by one of the big metal beams that break the viewport into sections. This sets him facing away from the stars, towards the rest of the bridge; Bow’s dread lives here, too, he finds, in this darkness that isn’t Ship’s Night, so conspicuously devoid of the flashing blues and lavenders and golds of Darla’s flickering controls. There’s none of that now, and it’s eerie, should-be-peaceful-somehow-tense.

Catra fits here. Bow, coffee cupped in his lap and midriff bare, chilly and awkward and chatty and tired, suspects that he does not. 

“Can’t sleep?” he asks.

Catra makes a move that he could, if he were feeling generous, call a shrug. He’s not, so it’s more of a shift. Her eyes don’t move from the stars. 

He tries again. Tries to flash a wry smile he’s pretty sure falls flat and asks, “Come here often?” 

This time she turns her head to him, just barely and very slowly. “Mm,” she says with the barest incline of her head. 

This isn’t working. 

(Nothing is working.)

“...okay, you know what? I’m just gonna go back to—“

“You don’t have to.” Her voice is soft, and it’s odd on Catra to hear it like that. Bow settles back down, takes a long sip from his mug, eyes her and her weird mood warily. She adds, “Power’s back in the galley, then?”

Bow registers confusion before he catches her pointed glance at his mug. “Oh, uh. No,” he does a little _cheers_ motion with the mug; it doesn’t feel that cheery, “dregs of the pot from earlier. This’ll put us out.”

Catra sighs, “No luck on the She-Ra option?”

“Didn’t talk to Adora?”

“She passed out fast. She-Ra takes a lot out of her.” 

Bow nods, then shakes his head, “Nope. Turns out, not so easy to magically heal a whole spaceship on command. Don’t suppose you could, like, almost die again for a sec?” Bow hears the words out in the air and is immediately horrified, “I am _so sorry_ , I’m just tired, I don’t mean—”

“Chill, Arrow Boy,” Catra cuts him off, a ghost of a smile on her lips. But her voice still has that softness, and it isn’t getting any less weird, and it’s still putting him on edge. Worse still when she simply turns back to the stars. 

They’re quiet for a long time more. Bow gets ansty in it, wonders if he actually did offend her or if she really does want want him to leave, and he’d normally know exactly how to talk to her because he knows how to talk to _everyone_ but his head feels sort of heavy and every few thoughts go just a little sideways and there’s doom in his gut and he’s _tired_ and Catra is _hard._

He tries, anyway. “So…”

Catra gives a bit of a huff, keeps looking at the stars because apparently eye contact _isn’t a thing where she comes from_ (he’s being ungenerous, he knows, he knows, he’s just so _tired_ ), and asks, “You can’t?”

“Huh?” Bow blinks at her, trying to figure out what he missed. 

Nevermind, she can make eye contact, because hers are on him now, blue and gold like the bridge lights that should be winking in the dark. It’s somehow even more disconcerting. “Sleep.”

“Oh uh,” he says, “uh, yeah. I can. I mean, I just.” He pulls his feet up onto the ledge to fold in on himself, mug rested on top. “Don’t want to. Right now.” 

“Sparkles hog the covers?” Her voice is still soft, but a little sharp, too. It makes her feel more like Catra, and that helps Bow relax. A little. 

He snorts. “Used to it,” he says, and tosses Catra a smile she doesn’t seem to catch. “No I, uh. Don’t want to wake her.” 

“That’s sweet,” Catra doesn’t sound like she means it. 

“Hardly.” Bow adjusts again, now sitting cross-legged to face her directly. She turns her gaze back to the viewport as he adds, “If I do, she’s gonna start talking about Adora again.”

Catra, in profile, blinks, and her hand twitches in Melog’s mane. Those are the only signs that betray her surprise, and Bow finds himself envious of her ability to do that, keep her cool. “Ah.” She says, neutrally. 

Bow is not so good at cool, and it’s her neutrality and her _silence_ that find him continuing, “And it’s gonna be all _Adora should have told me_ and _Adora’s a control freak_ and _Adora thinks she can call all the shots_ and I know it’s because she’s struggling right now but—” Bow groans, head tipped up against the wall behind him.

Catra says, not-quite-mildly, “Maybe she should quit giving Adora a hard time.”

Bow groans again, tries to keep it quiet, this time kicking himself mentally. What is _wrong_ with him, venting this particular thing to _Catra._ Catra who likes them, sure; Catra who is absolutely a best-friend-squad member (he’d said it, hadn’t he?), sure; Catra who helped them save the world, sure - but also Catra, who was here for Adora and Adora and Adora, who loved her girlfriend more than she liked the rest of the ship all combined. Sometimes, on the days when she was particularly sharp and snarling and mean-spirited and the only thing that could make her and Melog less spiky was a well placed hand from Adora and even then maybe that made it _worse_ , Bow didn’t think she liked the rest of them at all. Plus, Glimmer would be _so mad_ at him, for telling _Catra_ of all people this. Bow mental-kicks himself again. “Nevermind,” he mumbles, unable to take it back. He stares into his coffee.

“Quit giving you a hard time, too.” Catra says, and Bow looks at her sharply. 

“What?” he asks, baffled.

“It’s stupid! We have a whole broken ship and _just one_ mechanic. You can’t, you can’t throw tantrums at the people you rely on. I hear.” She chews her lip, and though she _still_ won’t look at him, Bow catches something in her voice that makes him think, _oh_. 

“It’s not like that,” he explains, fond now, “she gets that I’m under pressure, you know. She’s trying really, really hard not to vent at me because of it. She’s just awful at it.” He does nothing to suppress the Glimmer-specific smile that bubbles to his lips, “I love that about her.”

“Seems to be a problem.”

“No, it’s not.” Bow goes over the conversation they’ve had, revises, “Okay, maybe right now, but not usually. I wouldn’t have her any other way.”

“You’re just not going to bed.”

“I’m just not going to bed, _yet_.”

“Ah.” 

Catra chews her lip some more, and this one doesn’t feel like silence because Bow knows she has something to say. And then she does say, “Adora does it too.”

“Yeah, I know.”

She looks at him sharply, goes acid when she says, “Know _what?”_

Sometimes it feels like Catra’s always been there, always rounded out their quartet. And then, something will happen, and Bow will remember with stark clarity how very much that isn’t the case. This is one of those, and Bow tries to be gentle when he says, “This isn’t new, what they’re doing.”

Catra’s eyes stay on him this time, “What do you mean?”

“This whole...thing. Glimmer getting insecure, Adora deciding she has to do it all herself, those two things going all,” he makes a large, dramatic gesture with both hands to indicate the way in which they do not mix, and feels successful when Catra quirks a fleeting smile. He adds, “I just thought we’d gotten past this, is all.”

Catra gives him an uncertain look, fidgets a little in Melog’s mane when she says, “So, uh, what’d they do? To fix it, I mean. Before.”

“Glimmer triggered a planetary doomsday weapon and got kidnapped by an intergalactic megalomaniac,” Bow says. It still hurts to bring it up, even flippantly, but it’s worth it because it startles a real laugh out of Catra.

She rubs the back of her neck, but still gives him a sly look, “I don’t suppose we could find—”

“No, no, no don’t you _even,_ ” he says, but he’s laughing a little, too. 

She settles back, stretches both legs out and lets her tail spill over the side of the ledge in a way that makes her visibly more open, more relaxed. Catra does that, when she’s comfortable - sprawls. She likes to take up space, Bow thinks, though he notices she’s always careful to make it just her own, to keep her expanding bubble from intersecting with anyone else’s. She doesn’t initiate contact, not ever, though she doesn’t seem to mind when Bow or Glimmer touch her first and Adora is, of course, an exception. Bow’s pretty sure Catra’s and Adora’s bubbles aren’t so much intersecting as just...shared. Spaces that belong to both of them in equal measure. 

“So, what,” Catra says, “can’t you just, like...do your little Arrow Boy bleeding heart routine. Say some pretty words and fix it all up again.”

Bow sighs, “It doesn’t work like that. I don’t...I don’t say...really anything, a lot of the time. Usually I just...” he tries to think about how to explain it, “I point out if they’re being unreasonable, and get them to listen to each other, if I can. That’s hard for Glimmer and Adora, because when they’re like this neither one of them is a big fan of listening. And sometimes I tell them when they’re doing a good job, because that’s difficult to tell when it’s your own problem, you know?”

From the look Catra gives him, he thinks she might not. 

Bow sighs, hearing himself, “Ugh, laying it all out like that, I should just go back, shouldn’t I? Talk to Glimmer. It’s not like it’s even that _har—”_

“Don’t you _dare_ ,” Catra hisses, suddenly more animated than she’s been since he first saw her at the window. Melog spikes red and jagged in their sleep and Catra’s glare is almost a physical blow, it’s so intense. Bow remembers, tensely and suddenly, that this woman once threw him off a cliff without a second thought - but the memory is as fleeting as her anger, which is gone a moment later, replaced with a look of surprised frustration. She presses the heel of her palm to her forehead, avoids his eyes again when she says, “I’m good with words, too, you know? I can really fuck things up, with words. Destroying things is— I’m good at it.” She swallows so hard he can see it, then glares at him again, fierce and all sharp edges and nearly frantic, her ears pinned against her skull and her vehemence jarringly kinetic against the ship’s uncanny stillness, “What you do...you don’t get to call it easy, it can’t be easy, because if it’s easy, I’m—” she cuts off, scowling, but not at him - her eyes are fixed back on the stars, and her jaw is clenched so tight Bow wonders if it hurts. 

“No,” he says, the word less gentle than it would be if he were saying it just for her. He feels his brow furrow as he realizes that “No. No, you’re right, it’s - really, really hard, actually. I just...I don’t think of it that way. Usually.” He frowns a little, down at his mug, wonders if he should be adding something meaningful, comforting, kind, something to address the whole cluster of a mess Catra’s frustration is pinned on, but he can’t find the words and can less find the energy to say them.

They lapse into silence again, and Catra doesn’t get any less tense, so he tries, anyway. “You’re going to be okay, okay? It takes time, but—“

He’s cut off by a long, drawn out groan from Catra, followed by a whiny, “Do you ever _stop?”_

“Stop what?”

“All the,” she waves a hand to encompass his whole self, “helping! You’re just! So... _nice._ ”

“...thank you?” 

“I’m trying to be miserable, here, and it’s not even like you’re _happy_ right now! Can’t you _quit it!?_ ”

He’s about to point out that her misery is exactly why he can’t quit it when her eyes narrow at him, calculating, and she says, “I bet you can’t.”

“What?” 

“I bet you can’t. I bet you can’t, like, say something actually totally negative,” she says, challenging, now with a bit of a smirk.

Bow isn’t particularly competitive. He can hold his own, sure - he has, after all, spent years upon years as first Glimmer’s best friend and now her boyfriend, but that just means he’s hard to bait. And Catra _is_ baiting him, the way she does so well with Glimmer and Adora. But he’s not Glimmer or Adora, and it would be easy enough to turn her away. 

It’s her expression - engaged, arch, just a bit of a spark in her eyes and more playful than she’s been since he stepped onto the bridge - that has him deciding not to. Instead, he asks her, “Would that make you feel better?” 

Catra scoffs, “I don’t know, wanna find out?” 

And yes, he does. Bow thinks briefly, then says, “Fine. I just spent ten whole hours working on the ship and all I have to show for it is barely-there life support and some working earpiece comms. Which are on a network separate from the ship’s and, no, cannot be hooked in to call long-range for a mayday. ”

Catra makes a loud, negative sound, like an angry buzzer on one of those quiz games Castaspella used to try to get him and Glimmer to play as kids, and crosses her arms in an X sign. The noise echoes through the dark bridge. Bow says, “What? What’s wrong with that?”

“Too positive.”

“What do you mean, too positive?” 

“We have life support, don’t we?” 

“Only for, like, two days! Tops!” 

“I’m still breathing, Arrow Boy. Doesn’t count.” 

Bow grumbles. Fine, she wants negative, he’ll do negative. 

“Darla is old.” He says, and then, to drive it home, “Like, one thousand years old. With a crew from a planet where First Ones tech - which is, again _one thousand years old -_ is the most advanced technology we have. With a mechanic who _isn’t even Entrapta._ ” He’s almost breathing heavy by the end of it, he’s so stressed. 

Catra doesn’t complain about this one, just responds with, “We’re out of coffee,” and gestures a _your turn_ back his way.

The triviality of it is either a concession or a challenge, and with Catra it’s always a challenge. So he takes a deep breath, braces himself, and says, “Glimmer and Adora might never stop doing this.” It sits awkwardly with him, and he goes to qualify it, but Catra’s hard stare stops him.

He’s rewarded for his restraint. She takes in a long breath, then says, “I don’t know how to have more than one friend. Which would be fine, but I think I want to.” 

Bow looks at her carefully, and Catra blinks placidly back. Her blank expression - bravado, he knows, he can see it in Melog’s sleepy twitches, always bravado with her - dares him to break the game and pick that apart, so instead he trades her with, “I miss crowds. I’m so used to being able to fade into a crowd of, like, brothers or princesses and this, it’s just...everyone knows where everyone else is _all the time.”_

“There are no open spaces on this fucking boat and it makes me want to crawl out of my skin _."_

“Sometimes my stomach gets cold but covering it feels weird, so there’s no comfortable solution.” Bow grins when Catra snorts at that. 

She rejoins with, “I get bored way too much.”

“I can’t remember the last time I wasn’t tired,” he says, surprisingly easy.

“Dehydrated protein slaw tastes worse than Horde food.”

“I get sick of other people’s feelings.”

“I get sick of other people.” 

“Space is too quiet.” 

“Adora snores _really_ loud.”

“We can’t get out of this one.” The words roll off his tongue blindly, terrifyingly, not so much constricting his heart as giving name to the squeeze that was already there. He continues, tongue heavy, but he can’t seem to stop, “Not as it stands. The engines are completely unsalvageable. I don’t even know what happened to them; there’s no new damage, I think they just...gave out. And that’s not fixable. We can’t call for help with no working communications, and the chance that another ship will just randomly come across us...space is _huge._ It’s impossible.”

He swallows hard, throat clicking. Feels the shake of his own breath. 

There’s the tiniest intake of air from Catra and the barest flicker of surprise across her face before she shuts any window into herself down, schools her gaze into something sharp and blank again. In the following silence, Bow has enough time to regret the words, to wish he could bring them back and rewind time. He has time to think about it himself, feel the full weight of it, acknowledge with painstaking detail that the void of space is vast and black and crushing and probably inevitable and he can’t do anything about it except tell his friends tomorrow, that they can’t do anything about it either. He braces himself for her response, bitter futility or vitriolic fury. He has time to brace himself, but not well, and the pressure behind his eyes tells him that when she responds he’s going to cry.

“Adora’s right about the unicorn.”

_Huh?_

“What?”

“Adora’s right.” Catra scrunches her nose, points out the viewport at a cluster of stars, “I think it’s those ones? Obviously, we’re moving, so they keep changing, but I think it’s supposed to be those. Anyway, when they’re all charted out, they look like a unicorn.”

“What?”

“At least, I think it’s those stars? I have no idea how this works.”

“What?” 

“I said they looked like a tank, but Adora was _really_ attached to the whole unicorn thing. I gave her a hard time about missing her stupid horse, but,” Catra shrugs, as though this is a normal conversation people have after being informed they’re doomed to wasting away in space, “she’s right, if you look at the charts, they do look like a unicorn.”

“... _what?”_

“Hey! It counts as a bad thing! I don’t like it when Adora’s right!” Her brow furrows, “At least not when that means I’m wrong. Don’t tell her any of this, yeah? I’m sticking to my guns about the tank.”

Bow boggles even more, because. Because, was that…? Catra’s expression remains deadpan, and he can’t for the life of him tell if she knows that she…?

“You do…” his voice comes out hoarse, so he clears his throat and starts again, “you do get...what I said, right? Like, about the ship?”

“That we’re adrift in a floating metal death trap where no one can hear us scream with no recourse, no viable strategies, and not even unrealistic hopes to change that? Oh, yeah, totally.”

“And so you...made a pun.”

“No idea what you’re talking about.” Her deadpan’s still good, but her eyes are glittering, and tentative, and he’s pretty sure she knows what he’s talking about. He stares. 

Catra shifts a little against the wall behind her, saying, “Look, Arrow Boy, you got anything we can do about it?”

“The pun?” He’s maybe a little dazed.

Catra rolls her eyes, “The death trap.”

Bow chews his lip, waits for the tears he’d expected earlier, but the sheer absurdity of their conversation has apparently chased them away. Still, his answer is, “...no. I—”

“Cool. No good thinking about it.”

“But—”

“Anger I’d get, but all this _angst_.”

“I don’t—”

“It’s like you’ve never faced imminent destruction before.”

“It’s not—”

“Sometimes shit’s just bad, okay?”

“That’s really something coming from _you_!” Bow snaps, sick of getting cut off, “Anger and apathy, huh? Didn’t you spend, like, three _years_ doing that? And it was great for _everyone._ ” His voice is acerbic, raised, barely sounds like his own.

He expects Catra to lash back the way she does, so he’s surprised when she just surveys him, dispassionate. “It’s a crap long-term strategy,” she says, and then, “feel better?”

He does, weirdly, a little, but he doesn’t want to say yes and he thinks Catra might get that. Instead, he slumps against the beam supporting his back. “You know,” he says, “the last time I tried to avoid my problems for a night, I got captured by pirates.” 

Catra cocks her head, probably trying to decide if he’s kidding. “I suspect that’s a one-time thing.”

“Yeah.” Bow says, tilts his own head against the wall so he can look out the viewport.

The stars still bother him, sometimes. When they were with the Star Siblings, Starla had spoken warmly of star-watching with her family as a kid - it had sounded nice, when she’d described it, but so utterly foreign to Bow. The sky of his childhood is a blank one, wide and vast and pleasantly unmarred, cool and monochromatic and peaceful. This mess of light is stressful, new and so very hard to get used to and almost as unnerving as the dark of Darla’s silence tonight. Familiarity is nowhere but Catra in front of him, and even she is new, in her way. 

Bow closes his eyes. Opens them. Looks at the stars again. 

Staring at them, Bow thinks the vague, scattered shape of a thousand kind concepts; encouraging ones, hopeful ones, uplifting ones, possibilities and chances and heartening words that may or may not be true. He thinks of his own image towering hundreds of feet tall, of saying _if we go down, we go down together_ and not feeling exhausted at all when he did. He thinks of the broken, impossible engine, of the ship adrift, and all the positivity drifting through his brain feels hollow, tired out. He sighs against it, head tilting back. He thinks of telling Catra to get some sleep, of getting some himself. 

Tomorrow, Bow knows, he’ll re-check the engine. He’ll try again on the communications array even though he knows he won’t find anything new, and once he’s finished with that he’ll gather his energy and will try to talk to Glimmer or Adora, if they let him. He’ll try to tell them nice words, heartening words, kind words, and he’ll probably mean them, too, though right now he’s too exhausted to imagine how. 

For now, he lets the silence stretch out, feels it slide into corners and crevices and the dips of Darla’s inoperative console until it encompasses all of Bow and his thoughts and Catra and Melog and the darkness in the ship and the darkness outside it and countless stars and the very last of the coffee.

Catra makes no move to break it. And so - just this once, Bow decides - it doesn’t need to be fixed.

* * *

_Sea Hawk sits in the chair exactly once, because he begs and his friends are on the high of success and they relent during an early test flight._

_He bounds into it with glee, throwing himself down with a shout of_ “Adventure!” _Simply sitting, he finds, is boring, and so he stands upon its seat and props his fists on his hips and lifts his chin. It’s much more dramatic that way._

_Mermista has pointed out to him that what he sees out the viewport here beside Etheria is not particularly exciting, that this is more like floating in the shallows off the coast than voyaging the high seas. But he would beg to differ: the inky blackness is dark like the deepest of waters and the stars glitter like sun on the waves and the vastness before him feels like every ocean he’s ever loved._

_He props one foot jauntily upon the chair’s armrest - it only slips a little, something no doubt unimportant depressing beneath his boot - and strikes a pose. He is, he knows, the very image of the dashing space captain that lives in his soul. He begins the hearty composition of a space-shanty aloud, harmonizing his voice with the loud, intense beeping that, now suddenly present, keeps his beat; he feels the heat of his passion build, filling the room along with his song, higher and brighter and hotter and—_

_The next day, Darla’s crew installs an automatic fire response system._

* * *

They’re all on the bridge when the communications array crackles to life. 

Catra looks up sharply, ears perking and body quickly unfolding from the viewport ledge. She watches in the soft gold glow of the room as Bow scrambles out from under the console and Sparkles’ sulkiness drops in favor of fumbling her flashlight and letting out a surprised shriek. 

She-Ra sits up straighter in the captain’s chair, where she’d been doing her best approximation of an also-sulky, person-shaped lamp. “You fixed it?” 

There’s just enough time for Catra to take in Bow’s panicked “but I didn’t!” before a voice, high and a little nasal, is coming from the speakers.

“ _Hello! This is the captain of the starship We’re-Not-Gonna-Tell-You, paging the vessel Totally-Spacefucked. Is anybody there?”_

Sparkles reaches for the respond button on the console, then glares when she realizes She-Ra’s already rerouted communications to the captain’s chair. “Hello,” She-Ra says, “who are—“

“ _Nope! Sorry, honey, now we know you’re listening, we’ll be doing the talking. I see here you have...five? Five life signs aboard, all on your bridge - honestly, your anti-scanners are ancient, we didn’t even have to take those out, they went kaput all by themselves. Anyway, I’m keeping a close watch on your signals and I don’t wanna see anyone leaving your bridge, yeah? Oh, shit, sorry; shoulda put this one up front: we’ve got, like, five missiles locked on you. Don’t do anything stupid._ ”

Catra looks around the bridge, finds everyone else mirroring her own bafflement. Except She-Ra, whose all-day simmer of Sparkles-induced frustration immediately blazes into anger, “Are you threatening—“

“ _No, no, no, you_ listen, I _talk._ ” And then, shouting, but a little fainter, “ _Babe, can you disable their response capability for a mo’?_ ” 

She-Ra’s tone is deep and dangerous when she starts, “You dare—“ 

But the voice just keeps going, and She-Ra cuts off - livid - when it becomes clear that her own words aren’t making it to the other end, “ _N_ _ow be quiet, would you, I’m only gonna say this once. Anyway! You may have noticed a series of technical difficulties for the last day or so, though honestly maybe you didn’t since your ship is old as balls and already falling apart - really, what did you_ do _to her. Good news is: your security systems are also old as balls - and really weird - which makes you what we’d call a sitting starquop_.”

Bow mouths _“starquop?”_ and Sparkles shrugs helplessly. Catra’s busy watching with concern as She-Ra removes her finger from the comms’ respond button, glaring at the chair’s speaker mechanism.

The voice continues, and Catra decides she hates it: “ _W_ _ell, good for us, not for you. Point is, you’re kind of adrift right now, and we have a proposal. So, here’s how it’s gonna go. You’re gonna put your whole crew in escape pods - don’t try to tell me you don’t have any, we’ve scanned your ship, remember. Then you’re gonna jettison yourselves, and w_ _e’ll be taking the ship - which, don’t worry, we’ll treat her real good; she doesn’t_ have to _be such a dump. Got all the bits to fix her up real nice. Then..._ ” 

It clicks. Catra gapes. “Are we being _robbed?”_

“ _...fair distance away, we’ll put in an anonymous mayday to one of the closer planets; if they’re into it, they should be able to get to you before you run out of breathable air. At least..._ ”

“We’re being robbed! I can’t— what? Us!” Catra gestures wildly to the group of them, to Bow’s wide-eyed expression and Sparkles' furrowed brow, and to She-Ra, the fucking _P_ _rincess_ of fucking _Power_ , who’s still glaring with her hands now balled into fists. “ _Us!”_

“ _...fine if you decide not to take our proposal! We’ll just blow you up and trawl the debris for parts. You wanna negotiate? We don’t, so we’ll blow you up. Got opinions? We’ll blow you up. Try to threaten us? Blow you…_ ”

“We _are_! We’re being robbed! By a bunch of stupid—”

“Pirates.” Bow groans, “They’re pirates. How does this keep _happening_ to me.”

“. _..long to get to the escape pods? We’re tracking your life signs, so we’ll know, and we’ll blow you up. Sabotage your ship? Trust me, we’ll notice, and we’ll…_ ”

“Us! Like, do they know we saved the universe?”

“I don’t think they care, Catra.” Sparkles says, now rummaging for who-knows-what in the console compartments. 

“... _only other plan was gonna be floating around and wasting away. So, like, we’re doing you a favor. This way, you even get a…_ ”

“Anyone speak space-seagull?“ 

Catra gives Bow her best what-are-you-on-about stare.

He sighs out, “I’ll try for shielding." He doesn’t look like he expects much of it, but he dives under the main console anyway. 

_“...take a mo’ to think it over, and we wanna see you in those pods in,_ ” she names what must be a unit of time, not that it matters. This is ridiculous. “ _It’s not like you have anywhere to go._ ” 

The comms click off, and Catra’s about to start shouting again - honestly, it’s all so _dumb_ and also pretty try-hard as far as villain speeches go; Catra has severe professional disdain - but she closes her mouth when She-Ra stands up. Catra’s used to She-Ra, by now - they are dating, after all - but every now and then she still gets a tiny frisson of not-quite-fear when She-Ra’s like this, straight-backed and glowing with the untold fury of the more-than-natural. 

Most of the time She-Ra is just Adora, albeit bigger, nominally shinier, with more hair and a slightly different blue to her eyes. But sometimes, when she’s like this, there’s something to her that isn’t Adora, or isn’t _only_ Adora; something of a legacy whose history they still don’t know. 

“This won’t take long.” She-Ra says, arcane and hard-edged and terribly, terribly ancient. Catra swallows hard, a shiver rolling down her spine and into her tail.

“Aha!” Sparkles announces, coming up from the compartment she’d been so intent on, and it should break the tension but it really doesn’t. She’s dwarfed before She-Ra when she goes to stand in front of her, “Just rough them up, okay? And take this. And - follow my lead.” Sparkles holds out one of the earpiece communicators. 

She-Ra looks down at her, blinks. Then she pushes past, “We don’t need that,” she says, and it’s absolutely Adora’s words, albeit with that extra level of intensity only She-Ra can reach. 

It occurs to Catra that Adora’s been strung out for weeks planning routes through space, for days convinced she’d ruined the ship by guiding it into that asteroid field, for a day convinced it was her fault they were adrift with nowhere to go, only to find the real culprits now very casually threatening their lives. It occurs to her that Adora might not be entirely okay. It occurs to her they’re going to have to talk about this, because that’s what they do now when one of them isn’t okay, and it’s going to suck.

Right after She-Ra does something really fantastically violent to Captain Tryhard and the space pirates. Maybe it’ll be cathartic. 

Sparkles stamps her foot, and Catra thinks it’s very juvenile, “Look, do you want to _kill them_? Set _them_ adrift? We don’t have to! _”_

“That’s what they plan to do to us!” Catra interjects.

Sparkles ignores her, following She-Ra a few steps. “I don’t have _time_ to convince you on this, Adora - can’t you just...trust me?”

She-Ra doesn't even look down at her. “Of course I trust you, and if you need to feel helpful, that’s fine,” she says, but it’s perfunctory, any warmth subsumed in the single-mindedness with which she makes her way to the door, “sort that out later.”

She-Ra says a little more (“ _This doesn’t have to be complicated_ ”), but Catra barely hears it, because she's busy feeling suddenly very, very cold. She finds herself looking for Bow, sees his lower half still sticking out from under the console. She doubts he can hear a thing down there, much less track the goings on of the bridge. 

She-Ra is now striding confidently away again, and Glimmer’s slumped next to the captain’s chair, her expressive face clearly oscillating between too-frustrated-to-speak and winding-up-to-shout. There’s nothing here Catra can do. 

She-Ra can wreck these ships - _easy_. She can wreck the people in them, too. She can put _those fucks_ in an escape pod, jettison _them_ into space. Or, or, she can probably just rip the whole hold off their ship, bring it back for Bow to sift through for parts. 

All this? They’ll talk about it after. There’s nothing Catra needs to do, not right now. 

Everything is going to be fine. No action required. 

Just...stand back. And wait. 

Deal with it later. 

Catra groans. 

She ignores Sparkles’ “Catra— _what?”_ as Catra plucks one earpiece out of her hands and chases She-Ra down. 

“Hey! Adora!” Catra revels that even as She-Ra, even when angry, Adora _always_ stops for that. Even if she doesn’t turn around, her broad, glowing back tense under white-and-gold.

Catra jogs up to her and around, so they’re face-to-face. She-Ra’s face is as taut as her stance, focused and otherworldly. Catra should, she thinks, be intimidated. 

But she’s remembered, now - it’s _Adora_. So she’s not. 

Instead, she stands on her tip-toes and shoves the earpiece into the plane of She-Ra’s upper chest. “Take it.”

She-Ra looks down at her, impassive. Her hands do not move from her sides, one gripping her now-materialized sword (when did that happen?) and the other a tight fist. “I said,” she says, “that this will be quick.” 

“Uh-huh, yeah, we know, we know, you’re super scary. We’re all very impressed.”

The impassivity doesn’t break much, but there’s just a little more _Adora_ -ness shining through when She-Ra glances at the earpiece, glances up, says, “But yesterday, you said—” 

“I know what I said,” Catra curses every single thing that led her to this and hisses, “I’m an idiot. Sparkles has a plan, and it _probably sucks_ ,” she chances a glance past She-Ra’s bulk to see that Sparkles is staring wide-eyed at them, not glaring the way she should be. 

Catra looks away, back to She-Ra’s electric blue gaze, “It probably sucks,” she repeats, “and I’m not even telling you to go along with it, whatever the fuck it is. But. You should still—“ she gestures with her free hand to the earpiece she’s shoving into She-Ra’s chest, pushes on it a little harder, as if that will make her point. 

She-Ra is looking at her, appraising, and it’s probably only a few seconds but Catra feels every single one of them like an hour before her big fucking shining hand reaches up, takes the earpiece. Rolls it around in front of her eyes. 

And then, between the glowing gold of her tiara and the glowing even-golder of her hair, an equally gold and glowing earpiece appears. 

She-Ra drops the one she’d been holding in Catra’s palm. Catra closes her jaw, isn’t quite sure when it started hanging open.

“Well, that. That’s a thing. You can do. Apparently.” Catra says hoarsely, stares down at the earpiece in her hand for a moment before pressing it into her own ear. She turns it on. “Can you, uh. Can you hear me?”

She-Ra nods, shortly, and the look she gives Catra before she moves past is entirely Adora - Adora-cocky edged just the faintest bit with Adora-playful, all with the underlying simmer of Adora-righteously-furious (but not, this time, at Catra). 

Catra goes hot all over, and her mind orbits how very freeing it is not to have to deal with spite or guilt or fraught pasts or uncertain futures right now. Well, no uncertain futures besides the possibility of being blasted into smithereens in the black of space, but somehow that feels way less drastic than facing Adora and not being able to touch her without violence. Catra orbits the breathless relief of looking and looking and looking and knowing she _gets_ to look, knowing that that particular expression on She-Ra’s face is just for her _._ Orbits the way she can let herself lean in and not away when She-Ra brushes against her, all tense muscles and solid warmth, on her way out the door. 

Orbits, but does not land, because Catra’s mind is busy spinning with her girlfriend, seven feet tall and glowing and broad-shouldered, moving off the bridge with long, sure, strides. In the whole skintight She-Ra getup. 

There is a moment, brief, of silence. The room darkens, then brightens just a bit as Melog grows to compensate for the light She-Ra took with her. 

Catra says, slowly, eyes not moving from the now-empty doorway, “She’s gonna go and jump sword-first into the void of space to beat up a spaceship now, right?” 

“Uh, yeah.” Sparkles says. 

_Yeah._

“ _Y_ _eah.”_ Catra breathes. Blinks.

“Uh...Catra?” Sparkles’ voice comes from behind her, or maybe a million miles away, who cares. 

“... _yeah…_ ” 

The comms crackle back to life, and it makes her jump, spin away from the doorway. She refuses to meet Sparkles’ eyes as Captain Tryhard’s nasal voice returns, sharp.

“ _Okay, I’m trying to be nice,_ ” (Catra scoffs) “ _but what in the universe is taking you idiots? And don’t think I don’t see one of you leaving the bridge. Fine, want it like that, we’ll be firing in three, two, one—”_

“Oh thank golly goodness! Are you here to rescue us?”

What the _fuck._ Catra does look at Sparkles now, and she knows her own eyes are wide. Glimmer has moved to sit in the captain’s chair, and she should look small there but she doesn’t, feet on the ground and straight-backed, lavender hair colored deeper in the soft blue-and-red Melog-light and finger somehow imperious in how it sits on the comms’ respond button. But the voice she’s put on is about two octaves too high and oozing vapidity, the silliness of it at odds with the smirk she tosses Catra’s way. 

What the fuck?

_“What the fuck.”_

At least Catra’s not the only one confused, though she considers shitty-space-pirates-trying-to- _rob_ -them crap company. 

“You are, aren’t you! Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you!” Sparkles continues, and now it’s even weirder because Catra is _watching_ that wispy little voice come out her mouth. And then _that thought_ is weird, because this is a sparkling lavender-and-pink princess - queen - from a pastel-happy kingdom called _Bright Moon_ , and this is _exactly_ what a past Catra would have imagined she’d sound like. 

_“Uh,”_ comes the baffled voice from the comms, and Catra counts it a win that they haven’t been fired upon, “ _I don’t...think so? Who...who the fuck_ are _you?_ ”

“I’m Captain…” she looks at Catra, and Catra knows the face she makes when holding back laughter well enough by now, “Sparkles. This is my ship.”

Catra opens her mouth, then closes it soundlessly, not sure whether to give in to laughter or confusion. 

_“What? Then, uh. Who have I been...talking to?”_

“Oh! Oh, oh no. You don’t _know?_ ” Sparkles gives a shocked, sweet little gasp. “You see, we’ve spent the last few months under the terrible, terrible power of a terribly sinister creature! I thought maybe you’d managed to free us,” another wispy gasp, “oh no! What if she’s attacking _your_ ship!” 

_Huh,_ Catra thinks. Meets Sparkles’ eyes, her smirk. Feels her own mouth curl to match. 

That’ll do. 

“ _I don’t...what? What are you talking about? There isn’t any—”_

A loud crashing comes from over the comms, accompanied by what must be Captain Tryhard’s shriek. She-Ra's voice follows it through the earpiece, smug drawl just a little bit careful, " _Well, Captain Sparkles?”_

Catra hears a long, slow breath from behind her.

"It'll do," Sparkles says, and it sounds like relief. 

Catra feels it too, she finds. And so she adds, “Nice going, princess.”

The low, pleased laugh from the earpiece sends her shivering. 

“Can you _not_?” Sparkles hisses, voice sharp and firm and so very herself, and Catra can’t fight a smile. Then the shouting from the main comms dies down, and the sugar-sweet-innocent act goes back on for “Oh no! Is she hitting your ship? That’s how it started for us! She’s taking out your key systems, the ones that can really threaten her!” 

Catra scrambles over to where Bow is wedged under the console, half-listening to the conversation behind her as it continues. He looks both annoyed and frustrated when she finally tugs him out, opening his mouth and then closing it when Catra hushes him.

“Hey,” she whispers, “can you get enough of a scan of their ship to, like, point out the squishy bits?”

Bow blinks at her. He mouths the word _“squishy?”_ and Catra rolls her eyes, hisses, “Vulnerabilities!”

He opens his mouth again, then closes it when another shake-and-scream comes from the captain’s chair comms. 

His eyes go wide and then he nods vigorously, reaching for a tech pad. Catra grins. 

“ _What...what the fuck - Celestian! Shit, Celestian, are you okay? - what the fuck_ is _this thing!?”_

Sparkles continues to be high and breathy and - Catra can see, though it doesn’t come out in her voice at all - a little gleeful, “We call her She—”

Catra looks up sharply, waves her arms and shakes her head wildly, makes a cutting motion across her neck. Anything she can think of to communicate _maybe don’t turn the shiny magic symbol of hope and love into a space monster._

She sees when Sparkles gets it, “—eet. La. Sheet-la.” Catra stares, then has to admit that she’s impressed with Sparkles’ ability to just keep talking, because she _is_ still talking, pontificating sweetly about all the terrible things _Sheet-la_ can do. Catra herself has to smother laughter into her arm.

 _“Really?”_ comes over the earpiece, dry, and Catra looks out the forward viewport to see a fucking _huge_ spaceship - that wasn’t there before, was it? She-Ra’s blows must have disabled some kind of cloaking - with She-Ra standing on the top, hands on her hips. The space between ships is much too far to see her expression clearly, but Catra’s sure she has that whole eyebrow-quirk thing going on. Probably that little smirk, too, and—

There’s a snap in front of her face, and she jolts hard to find Bow waving a tech pad at her. Right. Right. 

She drags him over to the far side of the bridge, close enough to keep tabs on the story Sparkles is spinning for the freaked-out space pirates but far enough that she and Bow won’t be heard over the comms, as long as they keep their voices low. 

“...didn’t used to be this beat up, Sheet-la’s been picking away at all the things we need to destroy her for good. She took out our autopilot, and our navigation, and our engines, and even our ship’s power! And—”

“ _Uh, no. No, uh, sorry to break it to you, honey, but uh._ We _cut off your power._ ”

“Oh! Oh, dear. It’s so horrible you think that. _Oh_ , were _you_ the main power? We hadn’t thought Sheet-la had...amassed...enough...energy...to do that on her own...yet. You only could because of our, uh, our weakened systems.” 

_“Shit, Metoria,”_ a new voice, lower, fainter, _“_ that’s _why they were so fucked up! I_ told you _it was too good to be true!”_

 _“Shut_ up, _Cel, no one asked you! You’re always_ —”

“It’s okay,” Sparkles cuts off Captain Tryhard and gives a few innocent, wide-eyed blinks at an audience that cannot see her, “I forgive you.” 

Catra stifles another cackle and says quietly into her earpiece “Adora, you read?”

There’s an all too casual hum from the other end, the way Adora sounds when she’s just lazing around Catra’s room, as if beating up a spaceship is taking her no energy at all. 

Bow snaps his fingers in Catra’s face again.

She hisses at him, looks down at the pad, rubs a palm against her neck. _Weapons or sensors, weapons or sensors…_

On one hand, Catra would feel way better if Darla didn’t have weapons pointed at her, and she knows Captain Tryhard could turn those weapons on She-Ra at any minute, not that they’d be any match for her - probably. On the other hand, Tryhard could probably use their sensors to realize Darla has one less crewmember inside her and detect their earpiece network.

Catra knows what the right choice is, right now, with the information she has. She just doesn’t like it. 

She says, “You can get their sensors if you...” she looks at Bow, points to a spot on the ship scan, “how would you describe that?”

“Any semi-external sensorial wiring would most likely be housed in the aft center—”

Catra growls. Bow rolls his eyes, rephrases. Catra repeats it into the earpiece.

“You’re looking for a kinda sticky-outy panel on the back in the middle left - your left, not my left.” Catra smiles at She-Ra’s affirmative, and then adds to Bow, “You’ve been spending too much time with Entrapta.”

“I’ve been fixing the _ship_ , thank you very much!” 

There’s another ruckus from the pirate ship on the other side of the comms, and Sparkles takes their brief distraction to murmur - with her normal voice - into her own earpiece, “Adora, try not to get them that bad. Like. Not irreparable, if you can.”

 _“Glimmer, this thing isn’t exactly a scalpel,”_ She-Ra says, but there’s a resigned sort of humor to it.

“I believe in you, Sheet-la,” Sparkles replies, making her voice all extra-high and sweet again. It’s a joke, but Catra’s pretty sure it also isn’t.

Any reply She-Ra might have had is cut off when he main comms crackle back, Captain Tryhard snarling, “ _I’ll tell you this, Captain Sparkles_ ,” (Catra snickers) “ _if this is a trick, if this is some kind of intimidation thing, we can still blow you the_ fuck _up, and we_ will _.”_

Catra stops snickering. Bow, next to her, goes tense. Sparkles gulps visibly. On the earpiece, She-Ra - oblivious - keeps talking, “ _Hey, guys? What next? Catra? Glimmer?”_

“Stand-by, Adora,” Catra whispers, watching Sparkles draw in a deep breath.

Thing is, these are some pretty shitty space pirates, clearly. But it doesn’t take someone competent to hit the fire button. 

Catra kicks herself. She should have gone for the weapons. 

Sparkles lets her breath out as a high, incredulous little laugh. It’s an impressive - though Catra would never tell her that - approximation of shocked horror. “Oh, oh dearie me, oh no! You think - oh, oh, I could never. An entity as powerful as Sheet-la would be...quite impossible to ever control. I,” Sparkles laughs again - silly, nervous, stupid, scared, “you’ve _seen_ her! You think she’d take orders...from, from _me?”_

There’s a brief silence from the other end of the comms, and then, “ _I don’t_ —”

Captain Tryhard cuts off again. More shouting; the sound of something falling. A stop-and-start series of noises, then - pandemonium on the other ship, intercut with attempts at conversation over the comms that break off into more shouts and sometimes silences when the folks on the other side go off-comms entirely. 

Catra has been watching Sparkles’ performance this whole time, but now she looks to the bridge’s main viewport, instead, riveted as She-Ra lays gentle - for her - waste to the ship’s external bits, not giving its crew enough time to think. It's all flashing light and firm, disciplined slices of her sword interspersed with intricate-yet-controlled whips of rainbow energy, sliding along the other ship’s hull in a scatter of metal, buffeting it to-and-fro but but otherwise leaving it entirely intact. Catra breathes an awestruck, " _D_ _amn.”_

She-Ra’s next pass has a bit more of a flourish to it, a twist that’s almost playful. 

Catra’s pretty sure it’s for her. 

Even moreso when Bow groans, and Sparkles sighs a resigned, “ _really?_ ”

Yeah, really. 

The comms come back on, and this time they stay on, though Tryhard is gasping, “ _You...you said, something. Before. About destroying her._ ” 

“Oh, yes!” Sparkles sits up straighter, goes earnest, “We’d very nearly managed it before all this! Really thought we’d be rid of her for good!” She approximates a gasp of realization, so sugary and squeaky that Catra actually winces, “Oh! Oh my! You don’t suppose...while she’s distracted, we could…”

“ _Yes, yes_ please! _If you can—”_ more noise, unintelligible, “ _whatever it is,_ do it!”

“Oh dearie me, dearie me - but I can’t.”

“ _Why!?”_ the word is desperate, and if Catra didn’t know the other ship was in no real danger of anything except a few dents, she might feel a little bad.

Huh. That’s new. Adora would be proud, probably. Not that Catra is going to tell her. 

Sparkles continues, “It’s just...with our power all gone, we no longer can—”

 _“We can - hey! Celestian! Celestian, break the jamming signal on their ship, will you? Yes,_ fast _, okay!?”_

A beat, some crashing noises. And then, lights, bright in Catra’s eyes after over a day without them. The console hums to life, beeping cheerfully - cheerfully? - sure, cheerfully, though Catra recognizes that that’s probably less because Darla sounds any different and more because Catra had missed it, apparently, because maybe this ship has become a little bit home. 

That’s new, too. 

The familiar automated voice from Darla’s main console clearly detects who’s in the room, says, “Hello, Qu—”

“Sorry, Darla,” Catra hisses, slamming her hand on what she knows is effectively Darla’s mute button. Then she murmurs to the console, feeling a little silly, “Good to have you back.”

“Aww!”

“Shut up, Arrow boy.”

_“Aww!”_

“You too, Adora.” 

“Oh, thank you, thank you!” Sugar-alter-ego-Sparkles cheers, before adding plaintively, “But— oh dear, to do this now...it would positively drain all our resources. Our ship…”

“Another one, Adora?” Catra says.

“ _Way ahead of you,_ ” she gets back. She-Ra does a somersault in mid-space, coming down on the top of the other spaceship with a graceful, albeit hard, landing; shouts go up from the comms.

 _“We’ll help you fix your ship! Fuck - we’ll fix it up better than new, just, just— if you can stop her,_ stop her!” 

“Of course! We just need to...assemble the...apparatus. It’ll be a - what do you say? - a mo'.” Sparkles takes her fingers off the comms reply button. 

And then she starts laughing. Catra and Bow finally let loose their own laughter, and they all lose it for a little while, intermingled with the sporadic cackles of _“apparatus!”_ and “ _Sheet-la!”_

It dies down as She-Ra’s voice comes from the earpieces, a little awkward. “ _Hey guys? Um, we got a plan to get me out of here?”_

Looking out the viewport, they can see She-Ra shifting side-to-side on her feet, bouncing forward-and-aft a little to give it variety. The ship is bouncing with her. There’s a cheerfulness to it, and Catra wonders if there’s a way to order in a malicious spaceship of gullible pirates every time Adora stresses herself out, even if she also thinks that that maybe isn’t the whole reason Adora clearly feels better. 

“Yeah,” Catra replies, smiling, “I do. You know those rainbow sword-ribbony things? How many of those can you make?”

_“Uh...I don’t know?”_

“Let’s find out.”

The perk of having an emotionally bonded cat-shaped space alien creature is that Catra doesn’t actually have to give Melog directions out loud. 

The light show is spectacular, Melog cutting a red-and-blue streak through space - big as they can go, looping a few times, totally overdramatic, and no Catra will not admit that might say something about her - to She-Ra, who uses a torrent of rainbow energy ribbons and her own glowing self to orchestrate a sort of spiral-light-whirlwind, right between the ships, where everyone can see it. It’s very dramatic. Very pretty, too, and Catra’s planning to tease Adora about it forever, right after she stops feeling so goddamn _awed_. 

And then, when all the brightness and light reaches its highest point, it disappears.

Because that’s the other perk of having an emotionally bonded cat-shaped space alien creature: sometimes they specialize in invisibility. 

“I’ll go open the hatch for her,” Bow says and trots off, leaving Catra alone with Sparkles. 

She leans back against the main console and watches the other woman slump in the captain’s chair, clearly exhausted. They regard each other across the empty space of the bridge. 

“What next?” Catra asks.

Sparkles sighs, closes her eyes briefly, and there’s a satisfied smile on her lips when she opens them. She rests her hands on her thighs, shoulders stretching up to her ears before she relaxes them down. “They’ll call back,” she says, nodding to the comms, “in a minute, and they’ll be grateful, and we’ll offer to help them fix their ship as long as they help fix ours, get them to throw some actually accurate maps of this quadrant into the bargain, maybe some tips, for what they’re worth. I’ll spend the whole time using that ridiculous voice, and Bow will finally get the parts he needs - not to mention other engineers - and we’ll keep Adora from talking about She-Ra because she’s the worst liar in space, and you’ll watch everyone like a hawk to make sure they don’t double-cross us, though after all that I don’t think they will. We’ll get a read on this whole hijacking business they have going on, see if we can talk or scare them out of it before someone else gets hurt. And if we all like each other enough, maybe we’ll have made an ally, even if it’s under some shady circumstances,” she snorts a little, “not how I want to do it, most of the time, but they _were_ going to steal our ship.” 

Sparkles lets out a little laugh, incredulous and giddy, “I’m just amazed it _worked._ ” 

Catra takes in the whole short, pastel, glittery pile of her.

It’s a good plan.

“Not bad, Sparkles,” she says, “where’d all that come from, anyway?”

Glimmer is silent for a moment, watches Catra and bites her lip and shuffles like she’s trying to decide if she wants to voice her thoughts. 

Apparently she decides to, because finally “Honestly,” she says, slow and deliberate, “I thought about what you would do.”

Catra feels her face go slack. 

_What?_

It _isn’t_. It isn’t and Catra knows it. What Catra would have done - Catra doesn’t know, exactly, but it would have been more intimidating, brutal. Captain Tryhard and her crew would have been lucky to get out of it alive, and if they did, she would have made sure they knew exactly who had beaten them. 

Catra’s glad, suddenly and viscerally, that it wasn’t her call. 

She’s spared of having to explain this, because just then She-Ra re-enters the bridge, every kind of brilliant and shimmering, taking up the whole room not just with her stature but with her presence and without a scratch in sight to signify her recent flipping around in the coldness of space. Catra knows she wouldn’t be cold to the touch, either, because She-Ra never is - and Catra wants to touch her, of _course_ she wants to touch her, she always does, but this isn’t the time. And anyway, she thinks, a familiar and strange and always giddy thought, she’ll have other chances.

This time, it’s Sparkles who gets up, walking towards She-Ra with single-minded purpose. And She-Ra meets her halfway, phasing into Adora with a blaze of light just as they collide into a wordless, tight hug. They rock each other back and forth, squeezing, and Catra is surprised to find that the sight brings her nothing but warmth. 

Her eyes slide off of them to the bridge’s entry, where Bow is now watching, too, a tired smile on his face. Catra skirts wide around the hugging women, and when she comes to stand beside him he lets out a small sigh. “I didn’t do much on this one at all, did I?” he says, and it’s not quite clear what he’s talking about.

Catra thinks of the communicator in her ear, eyes the matching ones Adora and Sparkles are wearing. Her gaze flickers onward, briefly touching on the tech pad with the other ship's schematics, then back to the women holding each other in the middle of the bridge. “I wouldn’t say that,” she says. 

She’ll explain it all later, she decides. Instead, before she can talk herself out of it, she slings her arm over his shoulders with deliberate nonchalance. She refuses to look at him, because it’s already weird enough to drop the instinctive sarcasm and let her voice go entirely genuine when she adds, “You’re doing a good job, Arrow Boy.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Bow turn his face to her sharply, frozen stunned with eyes wide and mouth open. Catra stares hard at Adora and Sparkles, clenching her teeth and feeling her face heat. She’s about to move her arm, to find some snarky way to take it all back when the shock clears and his face melts into a beaming smile. He tucks his arm around her back, his side pressing against hers as he looks away, and now they’re both facing the people they each love most in the world, wrapped in their own embrace.

“You know?” Bow says, “I think we are.” 

And, Catra finds, she was wrong. It doesn’t feel weird at all.

* * *

_“_ _Hey, Armin!” Nora shouts, finally standing. She stretches, feels her knees pop and back ache, “Take a look at this!”_

_It's a testament to his enthusiasm that Armin gets to the doorway in about ten seconds. He doesn’t even try to hide the eagerness in his breathless, “You done?”_

_Nora grins at him, but she knows he isn’t looking at her. His eyes are fixed to the center of the room, never leaving her work even as he walks slowly to her. It’s not until they’re both standing at the front of the room, shoulder-to-shoulder with backs to the console, that he finally gives a low whistle,_ “wow _.”_

_And, of course, he’s right (if she does say so herself). The chair is stately without being enormous, sturdy and broad with clean, angular lines to match the rest of the ship. It’s not built for comfort, exactly, but its smooth backrest is large enough for even the most imposing captain to fit against it, its armrests flat and large to accommodate a complete control panel that is capable of hooking in to every single ship’s system. It’s her design - the whole damn bridge is - but this is the heart of it: made for utility but also for style, not to intimidate on its own but to highlight the strength of the commander in its seat._

_Armin nudges her shoulder with his. “Well?” he asks, “It worth getting your hands dirty? Back down here with the lowly engineers?”_

_“You know it is,” Nora nudges him back. And she means it; she had to fight tooth and nail to get to do this bit herself. Looking at her work - endless sleepless nights of drafts and blueprints and failures made into something solid, bright-burnished and throne-like, real - it’s so, so worth it._

_They lean against each other, admiring the sight, before Armin asks, “Hey, any news on who’s getting her?”_

_Nora shakes her head, “Nah, it’s real hush-hush. All I know is they have a few candidates.” A pause, “This is the big one, you know. They say the probes found— well, no details. But it’s big.”_

_Armin makes a noise of overdramatic frustration, “How about me? Can they pick me?” Nora laughs as Armin bounds forward, throwing himself into the chair. He rubs the armrests with glee. “Just imagine - no one else in the_ galaxy _has tech like this - we’re gonna be the first ones_ everywhere!” 

_“Uh-huh - I’m not so sure. I mean, say I put in a word for you, and you_ do _get that chair,” Armin makes a_ ha! _sound, and Nora grins, teasing, “you get_ all _the way out to some strange new planet, and you are the very first one on it. Tell me, hotshot: what do you do next?”_

_“Well,” Armin says, voice comedically snotty, “obviously,” he straightens theatrically, “I would,” he thrusts his nose high in the air, “definitely,” he hangs there a moment, searching, and then deflates with a blown-out breath and a laugh and a good-natured, “yeah, yeah. Point taken. I’ll stick to the hardware.”_

_“And anyway,” Nora says, quick now, barely thinking the words as they come, “what do you do if you get out of the ship and there’s already something there? Or someone? What are the chances there are just a bunch of empty planets waiting for_ you _to pop along and tell them what to do? How do you tell them you had a probe that said—” she cuts off, makes a noise, “who gave you the right? Who gave us—”_

_Nora stops there, surprised at her own intensity; reorients to find that Armin’s not quite meeting her eyes. He stands up without fanfare, brushing both himself and the seat off, and steps back from it._

_His voice is quiet when he says, “Well, guess that’s why we do stick to the hardware, huh?” He offers half-a-smile, tentative, “Not our call, right?”_

_Nora stares at the chair, now empty. She tries to imagine it filled._

_“No,” she says, and the words taste uncomfortably like relief, “I suppose it’s not.”_

* * *

Adora wakes to a low, vibrating hum, smooth and soft. It takes her a second to realize that it’s Darla’s engine finally - _finally_ \- at full-strength and isn’t her girlfriend at all. Catra doesn’t purr in her sleep and, Adora finds after a moment of gentle prodding, Catra is indeed well and truly asleep.

Adora misses her. It’s a weird thing, missing Catra when she’s right here, like Adora’s stored up the loss of her too much in the past few years for it to simply go away now that she’s present. And so Adora keeps missing her, on the bridge or in the galley or home on Etheria or on planet after unfamiliar planet. It’s the worst here in bed, and it’s frustrating: Adora doesn’t want Catra to be exhausted and doesn’t want Catra to have nightmares but also Catra sleeping is _too still_ sometimes, and Adora - guilty with desire - _wants_.

Adora wants Catra to be half-awake and curled into her, pushing closer and grumbling, her low purrs giving her contentment away as she flatly refuses to acknowledge the day. Adora wants Catra in motion against her, breathless and pliant or arch and demanding, or even Catra kicking her insistently, bored and annoyed and sarcastic and hissing her most creative invectives as Adora tries to cover her head with the pillow for a few more minutes’ sleep. All Catra at her most _Catra_ , Catra sharp and in motion and giving her a hard time and so clearly, utterly, vividly herself. Catra is beautiful when she sleeps, expression pleasantly soft, but she’s also...placid. Serene. 

Sometimes that serenity makes Adora think too much of Horde Prime’s ship, of the terrible stillness after, when Adora thought she was too late too late _too late_. Sometimes Adora fears - irrationally and piercingly - that this serene, sleeping Catra is going to open her eyes and they’re going to be bright acid green, or glitch away, or portal-darkened, or accusingly hateful. She’s afraid, even, that Catra will open her eyes and will look at Adora the way she used to when they were cadets in the Horde, like Adora is her whole world. The thought makes her heart clench, because Adora doesn’t want to be Catra’s whole world, not anymore - it’s too much for her, and not enough for Catra at all, at least as far as Adora’s concerned. What she wants, these days, is to _give_ Catra the world, many worlds, the stars, the universe. 

(Though if Catra keeps insisting Adora’s her favorite thing in it, well. Adora’s learning not to argue.) 

“ _Psst.”_

Adora starts a little, and sees Glimmer at the doorway with hands on her hips. She looks expectant but not alarmed, so Adora guesses it isn’t an emergency. Still— Catra shuffles a little as Adora extricates herself, and Adora pauses, stock-still to confirm that Catra’s breath is still even, still asleep. 

Adora prefers Catra awake, but - Catra moves, a bit, curling into the warm spot Adora leaves, her head tilting just so as Adora presses a ghost of a kiss to the base of an ear, little signs that even mostly still she’s _warm_ and _happy_ and _safe_ \- Adora can admit that this is nice, too. 

Glimmer’s dressed for the day, so Adora makes a pit-stop to toss on a shirt, scoop up her pants and jacket from their heap on the floor. 

_“_ What’s up? _”_ She murmurs low at the door, shrugging her arms into the sleeves.

“Hey.” Glimmer’s voice is quiet, too, and despite her firm stance she looks sheepish, “I thought we should...talk.”

Adora meets her eyes. “Yeah,” she says, because... _yeah._

There’s a brief silence, as their eyes break contact and Glimmer bites her lip and Adora fidgets. And then, all at once—

“I really shouldn’t—”

“I’m sorry that I—”

They stop, glare at each other, and then:

“What I mean is—”

“I’m trying to tell you—”

They each break off again, and it only takes a moment more of glaring before the looks melt into a flurry of giggles. Right, Adora remembers, all at once, this is _Glimmer_. Glimmer who’s watched her try to fit a whole cake in her mouth at once. Glimmer her best friend. She can talk to Glimmer. 

“Glimmer,” she says, “I know that I— _ow!”_ Adora looks down, hand and eyes going to the sudden, dull pain now at her side. Then she looks further down, to see...is that her shoe? Like, her _own_ shoe? She looks back up.

Catra’s head is raised, and when Adora meets her eyes - open, barely, in irritated, mismatched slits - she hisses, “ _M_ _ust you?”_

“Huh?” Adora says, transfixed by how Catra’s glare is sharp enough to cut and her hair curls messily at her pillow-creased ear and her face is scrunched in a snarl and a fold of blanket is falling off the gentle curve of her freckled shoulder and—

“ _Ow_!” Adora shouts again, eyes and hand flying this time to her upper arm. Then to Glimmer, who looks absolutely unrepentant at having pinched her. 

“We are having a _conversation_ , Adora!” Glimmer says in something half a shout, half a growl.

Adora opens her mouth to reply, but has to pause and dodge something red and white and flying - her other shoe. “Okay, okay!” she says, “Talking!” and then, at Catra’s wordless hiss, “Away!” She grabs Glimmer by the wrist and, with one last look at Catra (rolling her eyes, huffing, burrowing into the sheets, dragging a pillow over her head, sleep-edged and prickly and— _no, focus_ ), she retreats. 

Once they’re out in the hall they fall into step, postponing serious talk by mutual silent agreement. Instead, Adora asks, “How’s your dad? You called him, right?”

Glimmer smiles at her, “Yeah, right after we got communications up. They’re _so smooth_ , Adora, the upgrades are just...it’s like they’re not even long-range at all! Dad’s not bad - had a bit of a panic when we went incommunicado - Aunt Casta and Spinerella had to talk him through it. But, hey, all good now! He sends his love.”

“Spinny?”

“Turns out they really did make a we-were-brainwashed club. They’re _bonding._ ”

“I gotta tell Catra.” Adora thinks about it, “Okay, maybe I won’t tell Catra. How about Bow?” 

“Sleeping! Finally. He passed out the _second_ Captain Metoria—

“Captain Tryhard, you mean?”

“— _Captain Metoria_ and her crew flew off. Don’t _you_ start with the stupid nicknames, too!”

“I’m sure I saw him at least walk to your room.”

“I was nearly carrying him!” Glimmer exclaims, then hushes a bit in the pre-Ship’s Dawn half-light, “How did you not notice!?”

“Hey, I was pretty tired, too - do you know how hard it is to carry things when I can’t turn into She-Ra?” 

“Yes, Adora. I know intimately how hard it is to carry things when I can’t turn into She-Ra. What kind of question is that?”

Adora laughs, and it so totally could be any other casual morning that Adora doesn’t think twice before she lets them into her own designated bedroom. 

Adora doesn’t use her room, much - at least not for sleeping - but it’s a good enough place to talk. At least, it seemed to be, but now that Adora has them in and the door closed, her stomach drops. The desk and most of the floor are covered in tech pads and printed-out charts, a reference book they’d picked up from the Star Siblings and far too many pages of written notes in Adora’s own blocky, crammed handwriting; the bed is fully made, but not untouched, a series of papers and pads meticulously arranged on it to form the best star map she’d been able to piece from her disparate, messy sources. 

Two weeks ago, it had been a constant source of anxiety, locked so tight and tense and _personal_ in her that she’d only barely almost _maybe_ been able to consider explaining the stress of it to Catra out loud. Yesterday, it had been exciting, something she was ready to come back to and reconcile with the new charts from Metoria and Celestin. Now, it’s suddenly a jarring reminder of the discussion they’ve been putting off, and all at once Adora can’t meet Glimmer’s eyes again. 

So it’s Glimmer - Glimmer who is brave, and stubborn, and kind, and _smart_ , Glimmer who Adora admires with her whole heart - who breaks the silence. She says, “This is amazing, Adora.” And then, softer, “I didn’t know this was here.”

“Yeah,” Adora says, shame welling in her gut, “yeah, I know. I, uh...I should have told you.”

“You should have.” Glimmer sighs, “It didn’t even occur to you, did it?”

It hadn’t. Adora shakes her head, tries to explain, “No, I didn’t want— It wasn’t anyone’s— It was my—” she lets her frustration out in a sound, wishes she had Bow’s ability to put feelings into words, tries again, “I didn’t think. I didn’t think at all, really. It just felt like my—”

“Responsibility.”

“Yeah.” Adora fidgets, studiously reorganizes the bundle of clothing in her arms. “I’m sorry.”

Glimmer shakes her head, “No, no. You don’t do the sorries today. I do.”

“What, no, I’m the one who went off my myself to—”

“—and I’m the one who threw a tantrum about it,” Glimmer cuts her off. “Look, Adora, I know you have trouble remembering that you have support, and I decided a long time ago to _be_ that support, and I _know_ when you do stuff like this it isn’t about me. I’m the one who made it about my ego. I just, I just…” now it’s Glimmer’s turn for a frustrated noise - they really are quite a pair, “I barely know how to be queen! I have _no idea_ how to be _queen_ in _space_!” She throws her hands up in the air, collapses into a seat on a small sliver of un-cluttered bedding. The words hang in the air between them, and Adora almost responds, but Glimmer is picking at the edge of a star chart and chewing on her lip and Adora knows there’s more. She’s proved right when Glimmer adds, “I shouldn’t have taken that out on you,” and, “I’m sorry, too.” 

Adora sits down hard, across from her in the desk chair. “So, what? I keep making plans without you because I don’t want to burden anyone and you keep taking little things as signs you’re not a capable leader and every time we get into a fight over it we hope a crisis comes along and forces us to work our shit out?” 

Glimmer blinks at her, cocks her head thoughtfully. “Yeah,” she says, “sounds about right.”

They keep up only a little serious nodding before they both dissolve into laughter. 

“Okay, okay,” Adora says when they’ve caught their breath, “new strategy: I tell you my plans—”

“—and I tell you when I’m feeling left out of the planning,” Glimmer finishes. 

“And when we inevitably mess it up?”

Glimmer shrugs, “We try to remember this, I guess. And we talk it out. And we listen to Bow.” 

“...and Catra,” Adora adds, and the words make her feel light. 

“...and _Catra_.” Glimmer repeats, makes a face, “That feels _so weird_ to say.”

They laugh again. For the first time in weeks, even here in this room filled with all the things Adora does not know, all the plans she can’t seem to get right, all the answers she doesn’t have - Adora feels like she can fully breathe.

But Glimmer’s face has gone serious again, and as Adora starts tugging on her pants, that seriousness gets voiced. 

“Listen,” Glimmer says, “about the chair. It’s She-Ra’s ship, and—“

“No.” Adora replies firmly, freezes, then looks up, “I mean, well, yes, it’s She-Ra’s ship. But you’re the Queen of Bright Moon. And you’re the leader of the alliance - no, don’t argue with that, we both know that She-Ra may be the symbol of it, but you’re the one that made it happen. All the way from the beginning, it’s been your calls that decide who to talk to, and when, and how - and you’ll do the same out here. You’ve already started.” Adora takes a deep breath, because this is the hard part, “And uh. And you’re my best friend. I need you. Not just supporting me but— with me. You know?” 

“Yeah.” Glimmer says, and her eyes are shining, “You’re the best - you know that, right? Like, you’re _the_ person I want in a crisis. And every other time. But _especially_ a crisis.”

“Well, yeah,” Adora smirks, leaning back into her seat with an eyebrow raised, “I mean, I’m not sure if you noticed, but I can punch-out a spaceship pretty—”

“Not She-Ra.” Glimmer says seriously. “I mean, her too, and the spaceship thing is _super cool_ , but. I’m not talking about She-Ra.” She breaks eye contact just long enough to give a pointed look to the charts on the bed.

_Oh._

Something warm and glowing buds in Adora’s chest, and for once it has nothing to do with magic birthrights at all. Adora doesn’t know what to say in the face of it.

Glimmer seems to get that, because she moves on to ask, “So, what, we split it?”

Adora recovers. “Oh, the chair? Yeah, I guess. I’ll take it for, like, navigation stuff, and She-Ra’s good for intimidation, and - and maybe you can do the talking. Not all of it! I can talk! But uh. You’re good at it.” And then, earnestly, because it’s important that Glimmer know, “You’re a good queen.” 

It’s worth it, because Glimmer smiles so wide and glittering that Adora forgets for a second the other woman can’t do magic in space. 

This moment passes, too, and when it does Glimmer flutters her eyelashes, kicks her voice up a couple octaves, “Queen? Oh no, I’m Captain Sparkles,” she says, and Adora laughs, because no matter how many times she hears this it’ll just keep being funny. “Oh dearie me!” Glimmer slaps her palms to her cheeks, “I seem” she gets up “to have left” she gives a fluttery little prance to the side “my _chair_ unsupervised!” Glimmer spends all of a second pretending to skip to the door before she _bolts._

“Oh no you don’t!” Adora shouts, laughter not helping as she scrambles to give chase, stumbling and tripping into her boots, “That is _not_ what I said!”

“ _Gonna have to beat me!”_ comes the shout from down the hall.

“You bet I will!”

_“I have a head start!”_

“I have longer legs!”

—

Adora has a shrieking Glimmer in a headlock and Glimmer’s fingers shoving into her side by the time they make it to the bridge, and they’re halfway through another laughing round of threats when they both freeze. 

The bridge looks as it usually does - better, actually, its blue lights sharper and its sleek silver shinier, Darla’s beeping consoles in perfect concert as the stars dot the darkness out the viewport. Ship’s Dawn is fully past now, casting the whole thing in bright, gentle light. 

But the captain’s chair, which both Adora and Glimmer had been half-launched for, is occupied. The figure there is stone-faced, stern and serious, with one leg crossed over the other, idly perusing the control pad.

Also: it’s Bow. 

Adora blinks. 

He doesn’t look up, doesn’t smile, just calls a sedate, “Good morning.”

_What?_

Adora gapes. She’s pretty sure Glimmer is gaping beside her. They both wait for Bow to grin, wave them over, exude his usual cheer, or frustration, or _some_ kind of emotion, on his sleeve where it belongs. 

Instead, it’s just a cold lack of acknowledgement. 

_What?_

Adora opens her mouth to ask it, but just then, Catra breezes between them from behind, fully dressed for the day. She barely spares Adora or Glimmer a glance, though her face sports a winning smile and she carries a mug of something that smells delicious and warm in each hand. 

“Morning, Captain!” She chirps, and delicately places one of the mugs on the chair’s arm beside Bow. 

_What?_ Adora and Glimmer continue to stare at the tableau, Bow stoic and Catra agreeable. They exchange a horrified look. 

Catra puts her own mug at the navigation panel, fingers starting to work. She’s positively deferential when she says, ”Anything else, Captain?” 

“No.” The response comes back, clipped and imperious. “That will be all.”

“Yes, sir.”

_What?_

Everything was fine this morning, wasn’t it? Catra threw a shoe, and that feels right, but…

...but it’s space, and weird things keep happening. And they _did_ just spend time with complete strangers. Sabotage? Or maybe they’re in trouble? Adora exchanges another confused look with Glimmer before, wary of ruling anything out, she mentally ticks her way through Jewelstar’s list of hazards. Her hand itches for the hilt of a sword she no longer physically carries.

And then, Bow starts to laugh. 

“I’m sorry, sorry,” he giggles, collapsed in the chair with tears of mirth, “I can’t even— your _faces—“_ Catra is grinning too, sweet smile replaced with her typical insolence. 

These absolute _assholes._

Adora says, ”You absolute _assholes—_ ”

Glimmer says, “That was _awful_ how _dare—_ “

“Hey, Captain!” Catra calls over all of it, tapping at the navigation screen, “Where to?” 

Adora and Glimmer cut off their indignation as a purple holo-sphere grows in midair, one of their newest star charts spread across its surface. 

Bow pretends to inspect it, but quickly sits back and shrugs. He smiles wide. “Beats me,” he says, gaze sweeping across the bridge, “but we’ll figure it out.” 

_Together_ , the word goes unsaid. 

Adora hears it anyway. 

* * *

_The universe is made up of uncertainties, of questions and concepts and patches of darkness and bright things with no names._

_One of those bright things is in motion, shining and silver, and there is something brighter at its heart, strong and true._

_If the universe were to name it, it would not call it hard. If the universe were to name it, it would not call it solid. If the universe were to name it, it would not call it metal._

_The universe does not bother to try._

_“We’ll figure it out,” says a voice from the brightness._

_And, against the void and the odds and the starry expanse, they do._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love road trips. Road trips are a wonderful opportunity to see new places and do new things and hang out with people you love, all while under transport of your own power and on your own schedule. HOWEVER, road trips are also being trapped in a metal box with, say, three of your closest friends for months on end. And if you love each other enough to let your guard down - yeah, there may be some tension sometimes. Especially if one of you habitually vents her feelings, one habitually bottles her feelings, and a third oscillates wildly between those two extremes. And the guy who usually manages everyone else’s feelings just did a driving shift so he hasn't slept in a while. And the car breaks down. 
> 
> A few notes, should you choose to accept them:  
> -Bow does literally nothing useful this day except drink coffee and laze around and cuddle with Glimmer bc he _deserves it_. Occasionally Catra suggests useful things he could do just so he can have the pleasure of refusing. Adora does not understand how this last bit is fun at all.  
> -Adora starts moving some of her charts to the bridge, and having them tacked up everywhere makes the space way more lived-in.  
> -The alternate summary of this fic was "the monsters are due on maple street, but make it fluffy"  
> -Every single person who put up with me during the process of writing this fic deserves a medal. I am pretty certain I was insufferable and just want to say thanks again.  
> -My answer to the "who's the Star Trek-style captain?" question is: Adora & Glimmer are the captains, Catra & Bow are the first officers, and every cap+xo combo therein works like a dream, though it takes all four of them to make up the best damn command team the universe could get. They all make each other better. (And I love them all a lot.)
> 
> Edit to add 12/29/20: for the record, you can find me on tumblr as [ostensiblyarticulate](https://ostensiblyarticulate.tumblr.com). I've drifted into posting a bit of meta there, so I figure it ought to be linked here.


End file.
